


A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

by DisraeliGears



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe- Steve Doesn't Crash the Valkyrie, American History, American historical politics, Bucky is still the Winter Soldier, Eventual Smut, Happy Ending, Korean War, M/M, So much angst, Steve Stays in the Army, Steve doesn't go in the ice, Vietnam War, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, fic spans 1945-1979, so much UST, so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:35:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 60,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22013473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DisraeliGears/pseuds/DisraeliGears
Summary: He got off the boat in New York on May 13th, 1945, five days after V-E Day...A story of loss, grief, war, and a love that survives them all.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 139
Kudos: 339





	1. My Blue Eyed Son

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Ken Burns' "Vietnam War", Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", and "Good Morning, Vietnam". Highly recommend all 3. Also, the music I mention is definitely a vital supplement to reading ;)

_Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?_  
_Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?_  
_I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains_  
_I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways_  
_I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests_  
_I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans_  
_I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard_  
_And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard_  
_And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall_

_-Bob Dylan_

I

He got off the boat in New York on May 13th, 1945, five days after V-E Day.

He’d stood at the very tip of the bow, hands on the rail, listening to the savage screams of GIs around him, the howling of victorious youth, the jubilant bray of death defied time and time again. People jostled him, accidentally for the most part, glancing his way and saying a quick, “Sorry, Cap’n Rogers” before shrieking again and waving both arms at the thousands of civilians lining the waterfront.

Steve was home in America. It was a day he’d known was coming for months as his role as a walking propaganda poster became less and less important each day as victory in Europe became more and more of a surety. He’d held his breath, waiting for the bullet, the grenade, the mortar, that would take that day away from him, but it never came. There’d been days he thought he could taste his own death on the air, feel it in every footstep on uneven soil, but somehow his heart was still beating, lungs still drawing breath. It seemed so unbelievably implausible, yet here he was.

And now, this was the waterfront in New York City, the same he left from almost a year and a half before. He could hear the brass band playing an upbeat ragtime, the jangle of the chains that held up the gangplank. Civilians screamed up at the boat, girls waving flowers and handkerchiefs at their men, mothers shrieking for their sons, and a few older men were holding a huge home-made sign that read “WELCOME HOME BOYS.”

Steve wanted to vomit as he read it, and he turned his head away.

The deck was deserted by the time he found the willpower to pry his fingers off the railing, one joint at a time. The delighted cacophony below felt strangely muted, wavering in and out of his ears, as men shoved each other in order to get their feet on their home soil.

“Steve?”

He jerked out of his trance, turning around with a sharp inhale.

Peggy was standing a few yards away, a warm smile on her vermillion lips.

“You ready to go home?” She said, her voice raised to be audible above the rabble.

Steve nodded, letting his feet pilot him closer to her, his elbow bending and offering itself to her of its own accord. She grinned up at him as she took it, her brown eyes shining, and carefully straightened his lapel and medals.

“Can’t have you looking all ramshackle for the press, can we?” she said.

Steve shook his head, not trusting his voice. He felt her hand slipped into his, and her eyebrows raised in sudden worry.

“Steve? You’re shaking, are you all right?”

He swallowed hard twice, and nodded sharply.

“I’m okay, Peg. Just nervous is all. It’s great to be home.”

Relief washed over her, her smile just as glowing as ever.

“Great indeed. Shall we disembark, then, soldier?”

The press flocked to the bottom of the gangplank as Steve descended, the sea of men in uniform splitting and turning to look as he came, eyes gleaming with fierce pride.

 _Pride for what?_ Steve thought as he stepped onto the concrete dock. Pride for their country? Surely not for him; he wanted none of that pride for himself.

“Captain Rogers!” They were all around, flashbulbs exploding in great flashes like a grenade going off right in his eyes.

He felt Peggy take a step back, and he realized he was surrounded by a ring of cameras, both the massive film type and the handheld, and the megawatt smiles of delighted civilians.

“Captain Rogers! Captain Rogers, you’re home for the first time, what’s the first thing you’re going to do back in America?”

Steve blinked, and he realized his face had been smiling the whole time, completely on its own.

He couldn’t see much, there were so many flashes going off around him; all he could see was black and white shapes smashing into each other in grotesque blobs.

“I… well, catch up on some sleep, I suppose.” the crowd laughed as if it was the funniest thing they’d heard all year, and Steve felt nauseous again. It was the truth.

“Is there anyone special you’ve got waiting for you back home in Brooklyn?” a voice hollered, and someone wolf-whistled nearby.

“I… no, not waiting for me, no.” He wasn’t sure how to respond. Peggy was worth far too much on her own to be dragged into this circus and labelled as ‘his dame.’ It was nobody’s business, anyway.

“Captain Rogers, is there anything you want to say to all those boys who didn’t get the chance to come home?”

Steve inhaled hard, trying to swallow the rising need to vomit again. He couldn’t- not here, not now. He was Captain goddamn America, regardless of how false that felt now.

“Uh, I’m...I’m sorry. I’m...sorry you didn’t get to come home. Didn’t get to see your family, your Ma, your hometown. I’m...yeah, I’m just sorry, I guess.”

He had to stop talking. If he kept going, his voice would break, and they would all be able to see.

“You’re sorry?” someone called, seeming surprised.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Steve said, and he walked ahead into the wall of light, desperate to escape the hundreds of eyes, flesh and glass, cutting into his skin with each gaze.

_Sorry, Buck. I’m sorry._

The hotel they put him up at was The Plaza- somewhere that as a child and a young man, he’d been too poor to be allowed to look at, let alone go inside of. But on the government’s dime, here he was.

He was barely in the door of his suite before he was clawing his way out of his coat, dragging off his tie and throwing his hat across the room. The medals and pins jingled merrily like bells as he tossed his coat over the back of a luxuriantly upholstered chair, and the wave of guilt crashed over him so hard, he staggered and caught himself on a piece of furniture to stay upright.

It had been his job to keep them alive.

It had been his job to make sure they did their job, came home, saw their families again, and he’d _failed_.

God, how he failed.

Bucky, who he’d convinced to follow him even after being tortured for months in captivity, gone, because of him. Gabe and Jim, after following him unflinchingly after Bucky’s death, both dead after an ambush by a Panzer division. Monty, shot in the chest by a sniper and dying slowly, insisting to the last they go on without him and complete the mission.

And so many thousands more, lured overseas by the jaunty Captain America, only to be met with the filthy and merciless truth of war. Names Steve would never hear, never know, but wiped off the possibility of the future nonetheless.

So many civilians, so much hatred, so much _death_ that he hadn’t been able to stop. Hadn’t gotten there in time to change.

He’d been _made_ to change the world, but all he could feel was the gap he hadn’t been able to jump. 

Steve sat on the little chaise, its stuffing unforgiving and hard, head in his hands, fingers dug into his hair, fingers stuck in the pomade he’s shakingly combed into it that morning.

He didn’t know how long it was he sat there, but when a polite knock on the door came, he jumped at it.

“...yes?” he called, heart hammering.

“Steve? It’s me. May I come in?”

Just Peggy.

“Yes. Yes, come in, sorry.” he got to his feet on instinct just as she slipped through the door, and sat back down, energy draining just as it had come.

She was smiling, but he saw her take in his coat thrown over a chair, his hat across the room, and his tie dragged loose.

“You’re alright? You look exhausted, darling.” she came up to him, her hands gently cupping his cheeks, eyes warm and kind.

Steve let out a long breath, eyes closing. He turned away from her hold and rubbed his forehead.

“I...I want to sleep, but I just can’t stop _thinking_.”

Peggy came and sat beside him, taking his hand in hers.

“You can finally _stop_ thinking so much, Steve. I know it’s hard to forget, we’ve been fighting so long. But you _deserve_ to rest. I’m so incredibly proud of you.” her smile was, as ever, a glowing beacon.

“I...so many _times,_ Peggy, I _lost_. I let men, _boys_ , who I’d convinced somehow that war was an honorable and reasonable thing, let them _die_ because I wasn’t fast enough, or in the right place… I...I failed _so many times_ to keep them safe.” his voice broke.

“Oh, _Steve_.” Peggy wrapped her arms around him, clutching him to her. He couldn't stop himself collapsing against her if he tried, “You didn’t _fail_ anyone. You did more than anyone ever thought possible, you lived up to everything Dr. Erskine wanted for you and so, so much more. You’re a hero, Steve.”

Steve shuddered and pulled away. He rubbed his eyes roughly with the back of his hand, trying and failing to conceal the angry tears forming there.

“I told them to come across the ocean to help me fight for America, and they died for it, Peggy. By the _thousands_.”

Peggy was silent for a while, and they listened to the background rabble of the huge city outside the windows. Eventually, she said “I know hearing this won’t help you, but that’s war I’m afraid. It’s always terrible. But think of the horrible things we stopped. Of all the suffering we halted. It was an honorable cause to die for.”

Steve groaned, pain lancing through his chest.

 _Honorable_.

God, if only she knew. Knew the terrible things he’d seen done by soldiers. To soldiers. Because of soldiers. In spite of soldiers.

And how so many of them died on soil thousands of miles away from home.

“I used to be brave, Peg. I...before I went over there, before Schmidt, before…I know we did good. I _know_ we did what we had to do, and Christ but don’t I know I’d go do it again if I had to. But when I look around me, all I see is what we lost. Not what we won.”

“I know. When I went to London a few months back, all I could see were the scars from the Blitz. It took everything I had to try to see the good bits behind them. But they were there, Steve. You’ll find them too.”

 _Maybe_ , Steve thought treacherously, _but maybe I don’t want to look._

He knew what he’d see. Or rather, what he wouldn’t.

 _Who_ he wouldn’t.

They’d been sitting around a fire, a few miles from the front, waiting for orders for the next push into France. All around them in the fading blue light of dusk were spots of light from other fires in a long string along the treeline, other members of the same company temporarily banded together to take a small group of villages with the help of the now infamous Captain America and his Howling Commandos.

It was a warm day, early August, with a field of lush grass on one side and a dense tree line on the other, and the sound of the occasional laugh or shout could be heard across the field. Men in a tank crew were sitting on their vehicle, drinking wine and smoking.

Falsworth was likewise smoking, muttering under his breath as he attempted to heat his rations in a tin saucepan. Morita was reading and Dum Dum was cleaning guns while Gabe and Dernier played rummy on an overturned crate.

Steve was sitting near the fire, boots off, drying his feet and socks simultaneously by stretching his legs straight out from where he sat on the grass, leaning against a broken stump. It felt so nice not to be wearing shoes, he considered even possibly going barefoot into the next battle, uniform violation or no.

“You’re gonna burn your feet.” Dum Dum said around his cigar, polishing the barrel of a rifle he’d taken off a Gestapo officer.

Steve ignored him in favor of continuing to draw with his tiny nub of a pencil, which had been broken in half somehow, carefully outlining the leftover shards of a bombed church he’d seen the day before.

There was a rustle in the trees and everyone looked up simultaneously to see Bucky brushing off a few loose leaves, sleeking a hand over his windblown hair and holding a piece of paper.

“Orders for tomorrow, Sarge?” Morita asked, watching as Bucky came and plopped himself unceremoniously down on the grass beside Steve. Their shoulders bump and carouse, just like they always have.

“Nope. Not yet. Got something even better.” he held up an envelope triumphantly, “Mail from home.”

Steve smirked as everyone went back to their jobs, uninterested by Bucky’s mail.

“Who from, Buck?”

“Becks! And I gotta write her back this time; I’m months behind.”

“What a shit brother you are, Sarge.” Falsworth said, frowning woefully down at his sad dinner.

Bucky shuffled around beside Steve and leaned back against the same stump, head tucked down as his eyes roved hungrily over the page in front of him. Steve glanced at him before returning to his sketching, eyes flicking over several of his favorite parts of Bucky’s familiar, ridiculously handsome profile; the poker straight nose that melted gently from brow to bridge, currently furrowed between the brows with concentration. The enormous eyes, bright and full of life, framed in dark eyelashes, the lovely idiosyncratic chin with its little cleft, the sharp swoop of the cupid’s bow.

It was Steve’s favorite face, both to draw and to look at. A decades-old secret desire he tamed and indulged in only rarely; a hunger kept lean and weak by infrequent feedings. It had followed him since they were young children, and had only grown as they became men, a stubborn dandelion breaking through every layer of concrete poured over it.

But he’d accepted long ago that he’d just have to keep pouring.

Bucky burst out laughing, glancing up at Steve to check his attention.

“Here, listen to this: ‘I know Steve is with you, I’d known that stupid face anywhere, so you tell him you two best be keeping each other safe much as you can. If one of you dares come back without the other, there’ll be hell to pay.’ Hah! She’s got your number, Stevie. Can’t pull one over on a Barnes, eh?”

Steve grinned, shaking his head. “Tell her yeah, yeah, I'm watchin' you. I ain’t letting you die without walking her down the aisle; I know that’s what she wants to hear.”

Bucky chuckled and adjusted against the stump, carefully folding the letter away into his coat.

“Can I borrow a sheet of your sketching paper? I think I got a bit of pencil here somewhere.”

Steve carefully turned the page in his booklet to a fresh one, and then delicately tore it out, handing it over for Bucky to write his response. Bucky lifted his knees up and set the paper against it, and Steve rolled his eyes.

“Just use this. Getting too dark to draw properly anyway. You’ll probably hurt your eyes as it is.” he tucked his sketchbook in behind the sheet against Bucky’s knees.

“Thanks,” Bucky said, setting pencil to paper. Steve watched him write for a minute, listening to the scratch of the pen, the occasional break as Bucky thought about his next sentence.

He watched riveted as his top teeth would occasionally peek out and rake sideways across the lush pink flesh of his lower lip. Then he looked guiltily away, as always.

The sunset was a glorious haze of magenta and orange, made more dramatic from the constant smoke hanging in the air, darkening slowly over the distant hills beyond the front. It seemed likely that the German soldiers hiding there and awaiting their own next orders would similarly be watching the colours slowly fade from the sky.

Steve looked back when Bucky rustled a few pages on his sketchbook, flipping idly through.

“Got anything good in here we can send home? Becks and Ma will love it.”

Steve tried to school his reaction and resist snatching the book back like a guilty child.

It was too late anyhow; Bucky was already looking at one of the (many) portraits Steve had done of him, face contemplative but not overly perturbed.

“How ‘bout this one? Prove I’m still alive, still got my nose attached, and two eyes.” he held up the sketchbook, grinning.

Steve yanked back the book, smiling to hide his panic.

“Good idea, Buck.”

Carefully, Steve separated the page from the spine of the booklet, pointedly not looking at the intensely detailed portrait on the page. It had been entirely from memory, precise and loving in each stroke of the pencil. A love letter without words, decipherable only to one who knew to look.

Bucky took it without pause, gave it an appraising look, and then held it back out to Steve.

Steve swallowed, watching Bucky’s face as Bucky watched him, waiting for the moment of realization to dawn, or the shock to occur. Neither happened; Bucky just looked at him, mouth a vague twisted smile, eyes unreadable and flat in the low light.

“Gotta sign it, pal. Otherwise they won’t know for sure it’s you.”

Steve took it back dumbly, carefully and diligently writing his name on the bottom right corner

It seemed idiotic, to be putting his name on something so incriminatingly obvious in its desire.

But Bucky asked, and so he did it.

Steve handed it back, and to his horror Bucky held it up for inspection by Falsworth, who took it eagerly.

“Phwoar, Cap, if you aren’t half brilliant. As I live and breath, he looks as if he’s about to open his smarmy little mouth and call me bastard.”

Bucky snickered and took it back, folding it into his letter and letting Steve relax.

“Wouldn’t have to call you one if you wasn’t one, Monty.”

“And same to you with change, Sargent.” Falsworth fixed Steve with a considering look, “Would you mind terribly doing my likeness too, Rogers? Be a hell of a thing to send home to Mother; a portrait of her own son, done by the one and only _Captain America_.”

Steve nodded, all while carefully and discreetly tucking his sketchbook into his coat.

“Any time we’ve got a free moment, I’d be happy to.”

Before then, Steve would have to remember to curate his sketchbook. Fortunately, it hadn’t seemed as if Bucky had seen the few scattered images of just the shape of his lips, just his hooded and elegantly lashed eyes, just the back of his neck as it gracefully curved into his spine, or the soft, secret crease of where his armpit connected to his chest and shoulder when he slept with his head pillowed on his arms.

Or if he had seen, he hadn’t said anything.

Ⅱ

Rebecca Barnes found him the next morning, before he’d even had a chance to eat breakfast.

“I asked some MPs where to find Captain America and they said he was at the Plaza.” she was wearing her mother’s coat over a clean blue dress, her dark hair twisted into a tidy bun, her giant blue eyes, so much like her brother, hard and unfriendly. While no one could ever call her shabbily dressed, she certainly didn’t fit in in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and was getting looks from the other diners eating their Eggs Benedict and drinking French champagne.

She didn’t seem to notice.

“Becca! I...hello. Sit down?” Steve tried to smile warmly, but his chest was constricting underneath his dress uniform. He already knew what was about to happen.

Becca eyed him warily, glancing around, before pulling out a chair and sitting in it heavily, as if defying him to make some mention of her manners.

“This place is ridiculous. They almost didn’t let me in until I told them I knew you. Even then, I’m sure they’re just itching to throw me out. I hate places like these. Although I’d imagine you’re used to this now, all big and famous as you are.”

He hadn’t seen her in almost three years. But the contempt in her gaze, the grief riddled anger, it left no room at all for an emotional reunion.

“It’s not my cup of tea either, Becks, you know that.” he said placatingly.

Becca just turned her head away, looking at the laden table in front of him. She chewed her lip angrily, and then after a moment, reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small bunch of papers, all folded into one another. She carefully extricated one page, stared at it with the blankness of someone who’d seen it a hundred times, before shoving it at him. Her stare was boring into him, sharp and demanding with judgement.

Steve took it gingerly, and as soon as his eyes landed on the official letterhead, he knew what he was looking at.

An official condolence letter, sent by the army, to the family of one James Buchanan Barnes, killed in the line of duty on this, the tenth of November, 1944. It didn’t even specify where he’d been killed; all their ops had been highly classified, and so it just read “on operations in and around Northern Italy.”

He stared at the paper in his hands, unmoving. He didn’t want to be looking at it, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the words on the page.

“You don’t believe it when it comes.” Becca said, still watching his face, “You assume it must have been a mistake, and someone got messed up somewhere, or a wrong name was written down. We’d only got a letter from him two days before. The one with your drawing in it. We couldn’t believe it, even though he’d sent it months and months before. We’d just read his words, in his handwriting, how could he be dead? But… but later. Later, I knew.”

Steve blinked hard, trying to stop the tears building and falling down his face. He handed the paper back roughly, swallowing hard.

“I’m sorry. I...I really… I wanted to… I couldn’t write. I didn’t even…” Steve rubbed his face hard. His throat ached like he was choking, his jaw and chest tight.

“What happened? I have to know. I need to know, Steve.” her voice was forceful.

Steve took a huge breath before finally looking at her.

She was glaring at him, trying to be strong despite the tiny wobble in her lower lip.

Steve looked away again, unable to hold her gaze. He looked down at his empty plate, at his half drank coffee, at the dirty spoon perched on the saucer, and the revulsion for it all hit him like a wave.

“He fell. He tried to help me, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he fell. I couldn’t save him. Or…” Steve swallowed the rising lump in his throat, “Or maybe I could have but didn’t try hard enough, I don’t know. I...I don’t know.”

Becca took a deep breath, her whole frame shaking. Her shoulders seemed so little under her old jacket.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I don’t know...if I could have saved him. I...every day I remember it, Becks. I remember it and I try to think of ways I could have saved him. But I...I don’t know if I could have. But I…I wish I could go back more than anything. And try again.”

Rebecca finally looked away, sniffing hard, glancing down at the other papers in her lap. She shuffled them until she was holding the sketch of Bucky, the one Steve had signed, so many months ago.

She stared down at it, tears trickling down her cheeks.

She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, roughly and punishingly swift, before holding out the portrait.

“You should have this back. I...I don’t feel right having it.”

Steve swallowed hard. He was terrified to look at it again, to see the face that had followed him every day, every hour, since the last time he’d seen it in the flesh.

He hadn’t drawn a single line since then, hadn’t even opened his sketchbook. It would be like opening the door of a mausoleum.

“He wanted you to have it. For you and your Ma to… to know he was…” Steve let out a shaky breath, “...know he was okay.”

Rebecca laughed harshly and without humor, wiping her eyes again.

“That’s why I don’t want it. Or Ma. It just hurts too much for us to look at.”

Steve took the picture, folding it along it’s old crease as he did so, ensuring he couldn’t accidentally see it.

He tucked it into his pocket, and then sat there in stunned silence, listening to the quiet clink of cutlery and muted morning conversation.

He reached across and took Becca’s hand without looking.

“I’m sorry, Becks. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring him back home. More sorry than I’ve ever been.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded sharply.

“Me too.” she whispered, her voice just barely audible. “What...what are you going to do now?”

Steve looked over at her; at her hand in his, small and fragile in his now big and fleshy one, at the small pile of papers on her lap, at the tear tracks running down her cheeks.

“I think...I’m going to try to keep people safe. If I can.”

Becca sniffed hard and looked up at him, wiping her face.

“You’ll go to the Pacific?”

Inside Steve’s head, a plan was galvanizing. An idea; not a good idea, but a justified one.

“If they’ll let me. It’s just that...they made me for war, Becks. And I want to fight for what’s right. But I think what’s _really_ right...what I need to do… is make sure as few people get letters like that one as possible.” he nodded at the condolence letter on her lap. “If I can’t save him… I can try to save someone else. As many as possible. And maybe… maybe that’ll be enough.”

Rebecca sighed, a deep, miserable thing.

“I hope you’re right, Steve.”

“Me too.”

Becca was silent for a few moments, the clinking of cutlery and the muttering of breakfast conversation a dull blanket around them.

“It was the broken pencils, that made me really realize it was you.” she said quietly, not looking at Steve but looking out the big picture window at the busy street beyond.

“Broken pencils?”

“I mean, I had a pretty good idea. I saw the newsreels and things and, you know, the face and the hair was the same. But then when you sent that letter to me, and you said you were going away for a few months and if I could keep an eye on your place… there were spots on the page where I could see you’d pressed too hard and the pencil nub broke and you had to resharpen it. And I realized it was because you were so strong you didn’t realize how to be gentle with a pencil and I knew. I knew it was really you.”

Steve didn’t know what to say.

_Can’t pull one over on a Barnes, eh?_

Steve just kept holding her little hand and hoped he’d learned how to be gentle.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------

That evening, Steve sat in the bath, the hot water failing to suck any of the tension from his muscles. With his huge new body, even the grandiose bathtub in the Plaza was almost too small for him.

He sat with one hand gripping his chin, stare focused on the middle distance.

God, what he wouldn’t give for a moment of reprieve from his own thoughts. Then he could maybe, for a second, break from the horrible cloud of melancholy that had been dogging his heels for months.

Steve heaved a huge sigh and rubbed at his eyes, then slowly sank in the tub until his head ducked under, resurfacing and slicking his hair back from his face, wiping water and bubbles from his eyes and cheeks. He hesitated for a moment, then reached for a towel to dry his hands thoroughly, and then with one ridiculous long arm, grabbed his coat from where he’d dropped it on the tile floor in a heap.

When he’d undressed, he left his clothes where they fell around him.

Carefully, he reached into the interior pocket of the coat and with a hand that shook, withdrew the folded piece of linen drawing paper, with it’s one ragged edge and its tri-fold crease from where Bucky had shaped it into the envelope, and then been refolded by Becca.

He sat back against the porcelain, looking at the folded paper in his fingers.

Part of him wanted to dunk it under the water, have it disappear under the sudsy surface. He could burn it, but the Plaza had all electric of course, so there were no candles in sight.

Steve rotated the page in his fingers, and it dangled precariously over the water.

Then, he took a sharp breath and slipped his thumb into the crease, folding the page open.

He looked at the picture, his eyes stinging, and Bucky looked back.

The drawing was just as damning as it had been before, still too intimate and too detailed and too… much. Steve’s examination flicked over the careful shape of Bucky’s luminous eyes, which Steve had always thought were the most unearthly and sublime shade of blue; where his own were just regular boring robin’s egg blue, Bucky’s were one of a kind, gleaming a bright and rich lapis lazuli, like the blue at the base of a flame. 

Steve took in the delicate swoop of his eyelashes, the little parting of his lips, smiling ever so slightly. There was nothing inherently erotic about it, but it still oozed of eyes that lingered too long on things they rightly shouldn’t.

And dear God, he’d signed it.

There was a clatter from inside the hotel room beyond the door, and Steve quickly shoved the paper back in his coat, guilt and shame rising.

“Steve? Are you here?” it was Peggy again.

“In here.” Steve called, rubbing his forehead. The suds of his bath were still thick and concealing, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen it all before.

After Bucky died, he’d leaned on Peggy with all his grief and misery, letting her steadfast and unbending support gently coax him back into some semblance of a functioning soldier. Some time later, she’d come to him late one night in his officer’s tent and shown him how she liked to be touched, and had in turn touched him. They had sex often for a few weeks after that, but as the ring around the Reich closed, Steve was sent away more and more to help the Allies push into Germany. When news came of the Red army taking Berlin, Peggy had brought a bottle of champagne to his little temporary base in Alsace and insisted they drink it, before falling into bed together once more.

Since then, and the boat ride back to America, they’d been in separate hotel rooms, and neither had initiated anything more than chaste kiss good-night after dinner.

The door creaked open and Peggy slipped in, wearing a stunning black sheath dress.

“We missed you at dinner, darling. I assumed you were perhaps sitting up here enjoying your own company. You rather deserve it, I’d say.”

“Sorry. I lost track of time.” Steve replied, watching her as she perched on the lip of the bath beside him.

Peggy’s sharp gaze roamed his face, her lips curving slowly into a concerned frown.

“You look terrible. Have you been able to sleep at all?”

Steve sighed.

“A blink or two last night. Haven’t tried all that hard, really.”

“It would do you good, a full night’s rest. A bath is a good way to start, so well done-”

“I’m going on the train to San Francisco tomorrow. I’m going to fight in the Pacific.”

Silence fell, Peggy’s eyes widening.

“You’re...what? Steve, that’s ridiculous; you just got _home_!”

“You said it yourself, Peg. This isn’t home anymore. I can’t just look past what’s missing, I have to _do_ something.”

“You have done something! You’re a hero to everyone here, not to mention every civilian in Europe owes you a debt they could never repay. They don’t need you to beat the Japanese; they can do it on their own.”

Steve just rubbed his jaw with a wet hand, shaking his head slightly.

“I was made for war, Peggy. You know that better than anyone. And there’s still a war to be fought; I’m not done until _it_ is.”

Peggy just stared at him, jaw set, eyes searching him again but this time suspicious.

She glanced down at the floor, and Steve saw her see both his dropped clothes and the poorly hidden portrait.

He swallowed hard but didn’t watch as she bent to pick up the drawing, and he listened as she inhaled sharply when she opened it up.

It was quiet in the bathroom, with no noise beyond the background roar of the city and the distant bumps and bangs of the hotel.

It was almost a full minute before Steve looked up at her.

She was staring at the picture, a tiny crease between her eyebrows, which disappeared when she glanced at him watching her, and then back to the photo, several emotions flitting across her face.

Her eyes started to shine, and she gasped a quick breath, her chin trembling.

“Oh, you... _Steve_ , you…” her voice broke and she closed her eyes tightly, turning her face away as tears clung to her lashes.

Steve just watched her, his heart hammering.

Peggy took another galvanizing breath, dragging in a great lungful of air.

“Steve, you... _you loved him,_ didn’t you?”

Steve felt his chest burst open with panic, his throat close.

“I should have _known_ , I… god, what a fool I am. You… you were _so_ sad, I thought perhaps...well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I thought.” she carefully wiped away tears with her thumb, looking down at the picture in her hand.

Steve’s hands were gripping the walls of the tub, and he felt the porcelain crack under tension.

“Peggy, I-”

She looked up at him when he spoke, and seemed to immediately gauge his obvious panic.

“Oh, no, _no_ , my dear, it’s alright. I would never, could never.” she put her hand on his shoulder kindly. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear to you. You’re far too wonderful a man to have your name dragged into the mud.”

Steve sagged back into the tub, relief slackening his limbs.

“I...I’m sorry, Peggy. I...it’s not that I don’t...I _love_ you, Peg, I _do_ , but…” his voice died, but when he saw her watching him, waiting, with a kind and patient look on her face, he swallowed and continued, “He was all I had in all the years when I had nothing. He was my only family, my only friend, my _everything_. As long as I can remember, I...I felt…” he closed his eyes against the grief that crashed over him in a colossal wave.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me, Steve. I...I understand. He was… he was more to you than I could ever be. And that’s no one’s fault.”

Steve leaned forward and carefully, slowly, rested his head on her thigh, tears of his own rising. Her hand came up and rested on the back of his neck, warm and dry on his damp skin.

They sat that way for a while, motionless, the new realizations crystallizing around them in the spectacular bathroom, all the gilded fixtures gleaming and leering with a dark menace.

“I have to go, Peg.” Steve whispered, “I have to make sure as many of them get home as possible. That’s what my fight is. To stop _this_.” he vaguely lifted a hand, gesturing generally to the misery surrounding him in an almost visible cloud, before letting it drop with a splash back into the bubbles.

She stroked his neck, her thumb gentle on the outside of his ear.

“It won’t bring him back.” her tone was not unkind, and gentle.

Steve let out a long shaking breath.

“I know. But it’s all I can do now.”

Ⅲ

_1969, near Quang Tri, Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam_

The Soldier waits by the main Huey helicopter landing area outside of base camp, a safe distance from the hustle and bustle and shouting and smoke. Like the several men that wait with him, he stands in the shade of a bunch of palm trees, taking solace there.

Even out of the direct sun, the 100 percent humidity and 105 degree heat is oppressive.

He doesn’t notice it, or at least register it as discomfort on a conscious level, and it certainly doesn’t sap him as much as it does the other men waiting for the chopper, their M-16s hanging loosely off their sagging shoulders like wilted leaves, skin glistening with sweat.

Unlike them, who have all cut the sleeves off their shirts months ago, or are just in vests, he’s in full length sleeves, buttoned at the wrist, and dark leather gloves. In deference to the heat however, his shirt is unbuttoned just enough to expose his throat and a slim strip of the black sleeveless shirt down the front.

His hair, entirely non-regulation, is invisible tucked away under his helmet.

Nearby, a beaten up little radio plays Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, ‘Nowhere to Run.’

His brain processes the lyrics as he hears them, considering them, turning them over like stones- ‘ _Nowhere to run to, baby; nowhere to hide.”_

He knows this as a profound truth; he’s had nowhere to run or hide in twenty years. There’s no point in trying.

With a _thopthopthopthop_ that only gets louder and more aggressive, the Huey chopper comes roaring over the treeline, flattening the long grass into an undulating pea-green sea and making the fronds on the palms and banana trees wave and flap loud. The hard wind feels wonderful against the wet skin on his throat. For someone who’s been in-country as long as he has, the back of his neck and collarbones are neither tanned nor burned. Of course, his skin can’t do either of those things. The only burns that last on his are ones put there intentionally, usually by acetylene torches or something similarly hot. He knows; it’s been done to him before.

He climbs into the Huey, sitting in the back facing forward. He shuffles along as other men sit beside him, one smoking, the other eating what looks like jerky, one taking up position as the door gunner. One of them, who glances at him and his eyes linger briefly, has _FUCK YOU_ written on the fabric of his helmet in black marker.

The chopper takes off, swinging wildly up over the treeline, and he has to hold on to one of the aluminum handholds as it lifts. He uses his left hand, and has to remind himself not to grip too hard- his fingers can carve into aluminum like it were butter on a warm day. His shoulder makes a noise as it adjusts to the strain, but only he can hear it over the engine noise.

The men around him start having a loud and bawdy conversation, but he ignores it. It doesn’t concern him, and they aren’t assigned as his handlers. They’re talking about sex, he vaguely registers, or women; two topics most often discussed amongst the GIs. Neither topics he has any time for.

That is, until someone kicks him in the shin.

“Oy, Coles. I asked, what kinda nipples you like? Small and pink? Or them big brown ones?”

He blinks. He is Coles. PFC Robert Coles is his current name. It says so on his jacket.

And he hasn’t ever been asked this kind of question before.

“What?” he asks, likewise shouting a bit to be heard over the sound of the Huey.

At the sound of his voice, the pilot glances quickly over his shoulder, momentarily preoccupied, before looking back at his job. His hands grip tighter on the steering column. It’s not time yet.

The guy who kicked his shin is grinning and he closes his eyes, leaning back against the centre bulkhead.

“I like em little and pink. All perky like that? Aw man. The perfect mouthful. I had a girl back home, man. The best tits you ever saw. Fill up your hand, with the cutest little nipples.” he opens his eyes again and fixes them on him. “Which you like, Coles?”

He thinks for a moment. His programming knows how to deflect direct questions while on a covert op.

“Same as you. Little and pink.”

The guy grins in delight. He has a big gap between his front teeth, and he can see his tongue through it.

“Atta boy! Coles knows the good shit when he sees it!” he gives him another kick, this one gentler and teasing. It’s non aggressive, and doesn’t hurt at all anyway, so he feels no need to retaliate.

Besides, he isn’t at his dropzone yet.

The jungle rolls up and down below them, mountains of thick, ridiculous green rising and falling. The steam coming off it smells intensely of life and decay, dampness and thick air. There’s columns of smoke rising in the distance from multiple places all around them, hit with carpet bombs or napalm or possibly both. For almost an hour they cruise above the jungle, keeping low enough so as not to be seen from a distance, but high enough to avoid rocketfire from below.

His day’s worth of sweat is just beginning to properly dry in his hair and on his clothes when he sees the specific mountain formation hove into view- one sharp peak, another dull, bisected by a rise of slightly taller trees and a small river, visible from the air.

The pilot turns to him, and his eyes are bright with fear but also grim determination.

“Drop Zone Tango Delta Tango Bravo” the pilot says, and his voice shakes. _Here’s the place._

He nods sharply, mind and body shifting easily into mission ready mode.

Sounds and sights not pertinent to him drop away like fall leaves off a tree, so precise and calculated is his focus. If it doesn’t matter to his mission, it doesn’t exist at all.

He gets to his feet, letting the M-16 fall to the floor of the Huey. His fellow soldiers jump in surprise, and one grabs his gun for him on reflex. The pilot points him under the seat, so he stoops and pulls out a big rucksack duffle, heavy with gear.

He reaches up, undoes his helmet and then pulls it off, his hair falling around his face in a dark curtain. He tosses the helmet out the open side of the chopper, followed by his gloves, which he pulls off, finger by finger, and tosses out. As his metal hand is revealed, the eyes of the soldiers around him get wider.

Then, because nothing can be allowed to restrict his movement, he grabs the front of his shirt in both hands and pops the buttons apart, baring the faded black tank underneath. He pulls the shirt off his arms, right and then left, revealing the gleaming jointed metal underneath, reflecting orange in the hazy late afternoon light, the star on the makeshift deltoid flashing red. He throws the shirt from the helicopter too.

The soldiers around him all stare in shock, recoiling.

“What the fuck?”

“Jesus Christ!”

He picks up the duffle in his right hand, flexes the metal fingers of his left, and then makes a fist.

He then punches the fist straight up through the roof, into the hub of the rotors.

Immediately the helicopter jerks violently and starts to fall, smoke spewing from the mechanism. The whirl of the engine turns into a grinding shriek and then a squeal rising in pitch and volume.

The men around him are screaming in panic, flailing and grabbing on to anything they can hold on to, and he ignores them as he withdraws his hand, and takes a large step off into thin air as the helicopter starts to spin out of control.

He falls.

The air hisses past him, the green mass of the jungle rushing up to meet him. He can hear the screams behind him as the Huey careens away, twisting and plummeting. Men fall out of it, clutching each other, as it lists on its side.

He waits for the canopy to come, extending his left arm, hand open. He hits the treetops precisely, hand grabbing the first solid thing it comes in contact with. The branch immediately slows his fall, bending with his weight, and he lets go and grabs onto the rib of a massive banana leaf, which bows to lower him, slowing him again on the way to the ground. Leaves and branches slap at him like a thousand hands.

He lands, half kneeling, on the wet forest floor with a thump, the duffel still in hand, breathing hard. He straightens slowly, rolling his shoulders, one with a faint pop and the other with a series of mechanical whirs.

All around him, the jungle is alive.

Birds shriek and cackle, bugs scream and squeak. It smells of rotting leaves and old rain, ozone and trapped humidity. The trees are all tall and lush and covered in vines; no Agent Orange or napalm has been used here yet. It’s incredibly hot on the forest floor, well over 90, and he is immediately sweating once again.

He scans his surroundings, getting his bearings and cardinal orientation from the location of the sun. He organizes the next sequence of events in his head, and then sets to work.

First, he opens the duffle and withdraws his gear, quickly changing into his familiar shadowy black tac gear. What weapons he hadn’t already had hidden on himself he equips quickly and deftly.

Then, he listens carefully and takes note of his direction of travel, before heading off into the jungle, leaving PFC Robert Coles’ clothing and identity behind.

Now, he is just the Winter Soldier.

He finds the crashed Huey easily enough- it’s on fire, but due to the damp jungle, is barely catching on any of the surrounding vegetation. It’s spewing thick, oily black smoke into the air, fast and churning and high into the sky. He gives it a wide berth, staying well inside the trees, gauging sight lines and potential hides on pure instinct. He relies on sniper’s abilities he has honed for what feels like a thousand years, though he can’t remember how or why he gained these skills. It feels as if it’s knowledge he’s always had.

He finds a direction he likes, with optimal visibility and long sight lines. He scales an enormous tree, higher and higher until he’s well hidden in the canopy, sitting near the large trunk and settling in.

And he waits.

He can wait for days at a time, motionless and endlessly patient. Hunger, thirst, heat or cold, exposure or muscle fatigue, all are part of him. Things that should kill him are immaterial. His training is faultless, and his mission parameters clear. He can, and he will, wait forever if need be.

Even as evening comes, the heat is a physical presence, heavy and lethargic. His skin is slick, sweat dripping off his nose and down his chest and back. Moths come once the sun sets and uncurl their long tongues to drink the salt and water from him. A normal soldier would likely be incapacitated from dehydration. But he is no normal soldier.

The half-and-a-bit moon bathes the jungle in a bizarre irregular smear of dark impenetrable blues and silvery greys, leached of the daytime vibrance. The orange of the fire from the Huey has died to a glow, smoke rising slower and clearer, the superheated metal pinging and popping still.

He waits in the tree, and he listens, eyes constantly moving, body motionless.

He hears them about two and a half hours after sunset, in the pitch blackness of the night.

It’s barely any noise at all, just the snap of a twig, the crunch of the old leaf litter in a regular pattern of footsteps. A normal human without his enhanced senses would never hear it, and even then, he’s been trained to be perfect at picking up sounds that don’t belong. No one can listen for Charlie like he can listen for Charlie.

Other sounds, like the bugs and birds and his own breathing, are swallowed into what his brain associates as ‘Mission Silence’; the all consuming focus trained into his bones eclipsing all extra sound.

This is why he can hear them.

They come quietly, whispering occasionally, but otherwise mute. They are carrying Russian-made guns, far superior to the M-16s the American GIs carry.

He watches as they pick their way through the undergrowth towards the Huey, stopping and surrounding it before closing in. There’s not much left to salvage, but they poke through the wreckage nonetheless, every so often speaking to one another in Vietnamese.

He understands Vietnamese. He has no idea why this is.

After going through the rubble, they find a few charred bodies, one of whom is the pilot who’d been in league with him. Hydra had demanded this task of him, and so he had complied. There is no reasoning required beyond that.

The Viet-Cong soldiers below apparently don’t find anything in the rubble, and quickly retreat the same direction they’d come.

This is what he’s been waiting for.

He descends quickly and silently to the ground, his enhanced strength making tree climbing a breeze.

He flits after the retreating figures in the dark, keeping to the dense cover just off the indistinct trail they follow back up the mountain. Their awareness of their exact location in the unbelievably dense jungle, even at night, is genuinely impressive, and his respect for them grows.

The tactical parts of his brain, capable of quick combat decisions and immediate evaluation of long term strategic ability, know the VC have the capability to vastly outperform the Americans at every aspect of warcraft. From what he’s seen while in country, he also knows this assessment is coming to be correct.

It’s quite some time into the trek back up the mountain, over an hour, that he registers the other VC soldiers standing guard off the path, watching for the return of the scouting party. He quickly dispatches the one most likely to interfere with him, twisting his head around and silently lowering his body to the forest floor, before continuing on behind the line of soldiers. There are no lights, of course, but he can see the entrance into an underground tunnel, considerably larger than just a foxhole, and other VC soldiers standing around it.

He waits as they enter the compound, disappearing into the blackness of the tunnel entrance, leaving behind only two guards by the door.

He crouches in a wet pocket of darkness, watching the breathing jungle around him for hints of other hidden watchers, while deftly screwing a silencer onto the muzzle of his sidearm, a custom made 9 mm Baikal Makarov pistol. Sure enough, after about fifteen minutes of endless patience, he catches a glimpse of someone shifting their weight about a hundred yards or so away from him, barely visible behind a clump of bamboo.

He is close to his objective, and he is able to retreat into the Mission Silence, take comfort in it’s muffling blanket, to keep his heart slow and even, his every sense precise.

He disposes of the hidden person first, carefully skirting the bamboo and killing him silently with his left hand, saving bullets. Next, he slinks up the mountain and circles back, footfalls utterly silent as he nears the outcropping over the door. He crawls, poised above the forest floor like a jungle cat, slow and patient, until he can see the men below him.

He inhales once, deep and focusing, and springs into action.

He swings over the edge, landing on top of one man with his legs around his neck, twisting violently to take him to the ground, all while reaching with his left hand and yanking the gun from the other’s surprised hands, his own gun coming up and shooting him up through the chin with the suppressed _phew_ of a silenced gunshot. The man under him has barely a second to struggle before the pistol is on his head, and is dead a second after that.

He rolls lightly to his feet, quickly grabbing both men and tossing them one handed into the bush nearby, away from the entrance and the trail leading to it. He glances around, skimming the darkness for movement, and seeing none, quickly wipes sweat from his brow with the back of his right hand, still holding his sidearm. He slips into the profound darkness of the tunnel.

This new darkness is impenetrable, inky and almost touchable in its density. Even his enhanced vision can barely track in this pitch blackness. The Mission Silence is still there, focusing him on every possible noise that could indicate the presence of another human.

He reaches into a side pocket and withdraws his goggles, slipping them on.

Immediately, the darkness is rendered in bright green and dark green, the ambient light spectrum magnified into something visible. This technology, better than the devices used by the military which rely on moonlight, is only just newly developed, enormously less bulky, and only he has ever used it in the field.

He moves forward down a long dirt hallway, around roots that hang from the ceiling and protrude from the ground. It smells of old damp and enclosed underground space, but also of gasoline and diesel fuel, gunpowder and human sweat.

He continues until he reaches a T-intersection, listening carefully before turning left; he can hear indistinct voices that way.

As he goes, his goggles detect more and more light, so he tugs them down his face to around his neck. There’s a faint glow ahead, from a gas lamp on a table, surrounded by several hands of face- down playing cards. There are chairs too, pulled out but empty, and tin cups with dregs of coffee He doesn’t hesitate, just passes it quickly, and down the next tunnel.

More gas lamps hang from little metal claws here and there, and as he goes he notices a man sleeping, leaning back against the wall. It’s the work of a second to dispatch him, and he immediately moves on, a one man invading army into the heart of darkness.

The dirt walls, rather than turn to stone, become concrete, old and cracked but relatively sturdy. His intel was correct, then; an old French installment, long since abandoned and then retaken, likely before even the Japanese had taken and then lost Vietnam in the Second World War.

There is a long hall, with rooms branching off, and said rooms are large, mostly storerooms of ammunition, fuel and explosives, and some have people in them, sitting around, eating, playing cards, cleaning weapons, mending clothes. Many soldiers are sleeping on woven palm mats, tucked together like sardines. It is cooler down here, much more comfortable than the jungle above.

He slinks on through the damp and the dark, water dripping in along cracks in the walls, trickling in red smears of rust and rainwater. Roots hang thick like cables from the ceiling, or creep lazily along the floor like great snakes, and in places are entirely eating away at the concrete walls. It smells of mildew down here, still air and recycled breath, and fermenting jungle soil.

He reaches his goal at the very end of the hall, just before the tunnel has collapsed under what appears to be a huge weight of dirt and enormous boulders. There’s an office with a closed door on one side of the tunnel, and he slips through it as soon as he reaches it.

Inside, there is old furniture, boxes of ammunition, and an old rusted metal desk piled with papers.

At the desk, sits a man. The man he’s been looking for… or rather, has been _told_ to look for.

The man looks up as he enters the room, and dies before the yell in his mouth can emerge.

He lowers the Makarov and proceeds to the desk, pulling the man off of it before blood can get on too many of the papers in front of him.

He flips through several of the files on the desktop, none of which have the title he has memorized.

He turns pages, opens drawers, flips paper after paper, eyes scanning each.

Finally, in the bottom drawer, under a bottle of cheap whiskey, is an old, tattered dark green file with German, and then more recent Russian words stamped on it, followed by a handwritten English translation: “Operation July Sundown".

He withdraws the file and unzips the front of his coat, carefully stashing the file inside, before rezipping.

Part one of his mission is accomplished. He commences with part two.

He reaches into the pockets of the dead man slouched in his chair, withdrawing his book of matches.

He lights one, and throws it onto the desk. It catches on a stack of paper. He waits for the flames to spread and grow, then grabs a handful of burning papers and carries it to the nearest wooden box of ammunition, gently placing them inside, then grabs a few more files and adds them to the box.

It’ll take a while for the fire to get hot enough to set off the ammunition.

He retrieves the whiskey from the bottom drawer and rips a strip of sleeve off the dead man, shoving it into the neck of the bottle. As he waits and lets the liquor wick up the fabric, he lights a few more stacks of paper on fire. The smoke accumulates at the ceiling and builds quickly, just as the flames do on the desk.

He slips out the door into the hallway, Molotov cocktail in metal hand, silenced sidearm in the other. He can feel the impending chaos he is about to cause, hear it resonate through time and into his bones. He is an agent, an entity of this chaos, but also of calculated and merciless precision.

He goes to the first room in the hall, one with barrels of diesel and munitions, and quickly kills the man sitting eating a bowl of rice by an oil lamp. He knocks over barrels, spilling fuel onto the floor, before carefully lifting the oil lamp and throwing it onto the now slick floor. Hungry fire immediately jumps up, popping and snapping, and he steps out the door as the flames start to engulf the boxes of rockets and grenades.

He lights the strip of fabric in the whiskey, now soaked in alcohol, and steps into the next nearest doorway. It is the room full of slumbering men, but most importantly, several barrels of fuel. He throws the bottle. It explodes into flames and screams, immediate anarchy and confusion following right after.

He steps back out of the room, continuing backwards until he is past the first room that is now just a wall of raging flame, and as men flood out of the door towards him and the exit in a panic, he sets to work.

His arm is as much of a weapon as the gun in his other hand is, and the rest of his body is equal again to a third share. He is deadly and unwavering when the panic sets in to all others, ignoring the bullets shot blindly into the smoke and darkness of the hall.

He dispatches all who try to escape the burning room, running into him in their confusion and terror. He can smell that the palm mats have ignited, and in the chaos one of the gasoline barrels has been knocked over, immediately causing huge greasy flames to burst from the floor of that room as well.

The smoke obscures him, as well as his opponents, the flames occasionally offering an outline but little else. His enhanced senses and decades of ruthless training give him every advantage imaginable. He throws oil lamps mounted on the wall into the smoke ahead of him as he walks backwards slowly towards the exit of the tunnel. Someone tries to throw a grenade in their panic, but he catches it and throws it back into the depths of the hall, where it explodes and makes his hearing dip away briefly before hissing back with the shrieks of burning, dying men.

In the far end of the tunnel, he hears ammunition start to go off in rapid bunches, the fire finally reaching a level hot enough to set off the boxes in the back office. It’s only a matter of time before the grenades and rockets start to do the same.

He walks back out of the tunnel, the glow of the fire behind him lighting his way. There’s three men running into the tunnel ahead of him, dressed in full jungle camouflage. One is slightly faster on the uptake than the others and gets off a spray of bullets in his direction before he can kill him with his Makarov.

Being shot is nothing new- he’s been shot over a hundred times in his unreliable memory. He feels it as impact, not pain- one grazes his calf in a deep furrow, the other two follow in a spray line; one goes through his right bicep, but misses the bone, and the other into the file on his chest, which feels like a solid punch but not the burning shock of a deep puncture.

He leaves the tunnel, not bothering to limp. Behind him, he hears something large explode, and with reflexes tuned to exactly this scenario, leaps forwards out of the tunnel into a somersault and springs back up onto his feet some fifteen feet away as flames belch out of the tunnel mouth.

He stands in the darkness of the nighttime jungle again, the glow from the fire now illuminating him and the maze of tree trunks and undergrowth around and behind him. The world is bathed in orange and black; a tiger striped night. He pants slightly, adrenaline pouring through his veins, the heat still cloying and heavy. Sweat and blood, both his and not, is pouring down his arms and is sticky under his clothes. His hair is stuck to his face, coming loose only when he wipes it away.

Part two of his mission is complete. Proceed to extraction.

Actually, not quite.

He looks down at his chest, and carefully undoes the off-centre zipper of his tac coat. He withdraws the file, which has a hole in it where the bullet punctured, mushroomed and went into the meat of his chest, blood already leaking onto the old worn paper.

The file isn’t thick enough to stop the bullet itself, but the heavy weave in the front centre panel of his jacket is designed to resist light weapons fire. It is the combination of the two that saved his ribcage today.

He carefully lets the file fall open, and looks upon the first page.

And then…

And then…

And then something happens in his brain.

Something misfires, lurches from dormant to alert, and something that had been hiding comes screaming back into his head. A switch he hadn’t known was there is flipped, and a fuse explodes in a shower of sparks.

Pinned to the interior of the file is a photo of a man. The man is very handsome, with a square cut jaw, serious eyebrows, intense eyes. The photo is in black and white, but for some reason, he knows that this man’s hair is dark blonde, combed meticulously back from his forehead and parted on the right. His shoulders are enormously wide, what’s visible of his arms are likewise large, and his chest is broad and thick.

He is wearing a dark uniform with a white star in the centre of that powerful chest.

And the Winter Soldier’s brain, as he stares at the photo, is in overload.

The special infil ops agents find him an hour after sunrise, staring at the file in his hands, sitting on the leaf littered jungle floor near the smoldering remains of the hidden base.

The extraction point they were supposed to pick him up at was one click North of the smoke, but when he hadn’t arrived, they’d been sent into the jungle to find their formidable lost lamb.

There are three of them, each in heavy duty jungle tac gear not affiliated with any of the units American soldiers, marines or navy already in Vietnam, their weapons far beyond anything else available in-country.

They approach him with practiced wariness, standing a safe distance away, guns at the ready.

Always, always at the ready.

“You awake, asshole?” one says, stepping sideways to enter his field of vision, but remaining around ten feet away.

He is staring down at the file, at the photo he now is holding in his shaking hands, has been holding, _cradling,_ for several hours.

“ _I said, are you AWAKE. ASSHOLE.”_ the soldier says again only louder, kicking leaves and a loose stick at him but coming no closer.

“Why do I know him?” he says quietly. His voice is crumbling, his breathing is fast and bordering on panic.

“What?”

“ _Why do I know him?_ ” he says again, slightly more forceful. His eyes have drifted out of focus, strange images flashing into his memory like lightning across the sky. Dead things in his mind are coming to life, moving beneath the earth under graves that have long gone cold.

The Mission Silence he can always rely on to calm him, is obliterated by the photo in his hands. Every sound around him unbearably loud and intrusive, overwhelming and sharp. He can’t cut out _any_ of it.

“Oh, get the fuck up already. You missed your extraction. We’re behind schedule by hours. We have to be back on base by oh-seven hundred.” The soldier points his weapon with more malice but again, comes no closer.

He stares back down at the picture, he feels his lip tremble with an emotion he hasn’t felt in… in how long? How long ago did he feel this? Has he ever felt this?

“ _WHY DO I KNOW HIM?!”_ he says again, this time looking up at the soldier in front of him. His chest is rapidly rising and falling, and his throat is under intense pressure by some unknown force. He feels like he is choking on the air, on all the things he can’t see in his own mind.

“The fuck is wrong with him? What do we do?” asks one of the soldiers behind him, addressing the one in front.

“Jesus Christ.” the first soldier keeps his SMG pointed at him, but speaks into a radio mounted on his shoulder, “Yeah, this is Echo Team, we’ve got him, but send down the Colonel. Tell him his toy is broken, over.”

“ _Roger, Echo Team, standby, over.”_ the radio is a synthetic fizzle in the highly organic jungle air.

“Why do I know him?” he says again, and this time it’s a pleading whimper.

_His name was Steve. His name was Captain. He was small. He was big. He was in Europe. He was in New York. He was short he was tall he was he was he was he was…_

“Who is he talking about? What’s he looking at?” asks the soldier behind again.

“Well _I_ ain’t getting close enough to look,” says the one beside him, who’d remained silent until then.

“He’s got a file. On his lap. He’s holding a picture.” says the soldier in front.

“ _Tell me! Who he is!”_ his shout travels into the canopy, frightening a flock of colourful birds.

Silence falls around him, the soldiers all looking at each other and at him. They don’t know what to do. Their uncertainty is palpable even to him in his scattered state.

“Please tell me.” he begs, and holds his hand up holding the photo, in the direction of the man in front of him.

The soldier doesn’t move. He looks quickly from the men behind and then to him again, processing, calculating.

He inhales, holds it.

Takes a step forward.

“Reenders!” says one of the other soldiers, their voice a shocked warning.

“Yeah, yeah, keep your fucking shirt on.”

The soldier takes another step, gun still on him as he advances.

“He’s gonna rip your fucking head off, Reenders.” says the other soldier, his voice betraying his apprehension.

“Can I see the picture?” the soldier holds out his hand, palm up. His voice is gentle.

He hesitates, looks at the photo in his flesh fingers, and then at the open palm in front of him.

He looks at the picture again.

Those eyes. The shape of them feels like something so incredibly, terribly important, but he’s forgotten, he’s _forgotten,_ how could he forget??

He looks slowly back up at the nameless soldier in front of him, with his hand and his gun.

His metal arm comes up and into the gun, smashing it into the man’s face before he’s even had a chance to blink in surprise. The other soldiers don’t shoot immediately; they’re better trained than that. They do, however, start shouting, when he launches up into the man, sending them over and onto the jungle floor. His hands are pummeling, throttling, breaking everything he can reach.

“SHOOT HIM!”

“WE CAN’T!”

“JUST FUCKING SHOOT HIM!”

“ _DON’T_ shoot him.” It’s a new voice, clear and cutting through all sound.

He freezes, metal fist raised mid-descent into the soldier’s face. His body is rigid, motionless.

“He’s worth millions and millions of dollars, you’re worth next to nothing. I don’t care what he does; you don’t shoot him.” the voice comes closer from behind, the jungle crunching underfoot.

He doesn’t turn or move, doesn’t even breath. He listens to the footsteps.

“On your feet.” comes the command.

He springs up, off the man on the ground, hands falling by his sides. He is breathing erratically, his heart is sprinting in his chest.

“Mission report.” the order is direct and crisp.

He takes a few gasping breaths but he can’t make himself speak. His mind is filled with the image in the photograph, which is crumpled in his fist, and it eclipses even the Handler.

“Mission. Report.” it comes again, this time even more firm.

He’s shivering. He isn’t the least bit cold, but he’s shivering like he does when they thaw him too quickly.

It feels like his _brain_ is trying to thaw for the first time in decades.

“C-c-c-c….” he says, and swallows hard, “c-complete, sir.”

The Colonel walks around him and stoops, picking up the cast aside folder. He straightens, looking down at it, eyes flicking over the pages as he carefully aligns the edges.

He is terribly handsome, much like the man in the photo clutched desperately in his flesh hand. The Colonel’s hair is also blonde, his eyes also blue, shoulders also broad, though not quite as dramatically so as the man with the star on his chest.

The stark difference, though, is the Winter Soldier has no strange, murky memories of this man. All memories of him are immediate and as unforgivingly real as they are terrifying.

There is no kindness to be found when he looks at his face, and no fondness glowing in his chest when he hears his voice.

This man is not a friend. He is the one with the power.

“Good work, soldier. You completed your task with efficiency and accuracy.” the Colonel says, smiling warmly at him. He knows that this is not a real smile.

“He...he _killed_ Reenders, sir!” one of the soldiers says, waving at the man on the ground.

As if on cue, the aforementioned Reenders lets out a reedy wheeze.

“Not quite, it would seem. And he knew the risk he took. He won’t make that mistake again.” the Colonel glances up from the file in his hands at the two soldiers, who stand in nervous, tense readiness, “Take Reenders back to the chopper and wait there. Now.”

They immediately comply without further comment, pick the bloody pulp of a man up off the forest floor, and disappear in the direction they came.

The Colonel closes the folder and tucks it under his arm.

“So. You want to tell me why you weren’t at the extraction point?”

He glances up into the Colonel’s face, then back down at the ashen dead leaves on the ground. He licks his lips, his shoulders still rising and falling quickly in his distress.

All he can see in his mind’s eye is the face in the photo, see it smiling a crooked smile at him, see him lifting a hand and placing it on his shoulder in easy comradery. He can almost _feel_ the weight of the hand, feel its warmth on his collarbone.

“ _Speak._ ” The Colonel snaps his fingers twice directly in front of his face, and he flinches.

“Mission details unclear.” he says, his voice wavering and quiet.

“Unclear? Which part?” The Colonel’s face is always unflinching, it never shows any emotion or gives a sense of what’s going on behind his bright blue eyes. He stares at him, unblinking, expectant.

“Who...who is the man in the file?” he stares back, and his voice is pleading now.

The Colonel just watches him, face blank if not slightly amused. His eyes trace over him, one feature at a time, as if adding each up in turn, to see if his question merits a response.

He very, very rarely asks questions.

The Colonel takes a deep breath, as if resigned to his answer.

“That man is Captain America. Information about his physiology and vulnerabilities was traded to Hanoi by the Soviets, but then they refused to honor the info sharing deal with me and the forces I represent. You retrieved that valuable information, and yet again, your actions have shaped this world for the better.”

“But why do I _know_ him?” he asks, and there is fear in his voice now. He is afraid, but he doesn’t know why.

He is afraid for all the things he doesn’t know.

“You _don’t_ know him.” the Colonel says sharply, firmly, unarguably. “You don’t _know_ anyone. That is why you are so special, and why you are so valuable.”

He can feel the lie. The Colonel’s face betrays nothing whatsoever, and it never does, but he can feel the untruth of what he says. His bones, his flesh, his blood are all telling him that these words are false, and it is terrifying.

He shakes his head, a little at first, and then more. Despite his fear of this man, and of the uncertainty washing over him in colossal waves, he knows he must insist.

“No. I...I do know him. I _know him_.”

This is the first time ever he can remember directly contradicting a handler.

The Colonel watches him for a moment, before slowly raising one hand and placing it gently on the side of his neck.

It would be a comforting gesture, but he knows it for what it really is. It’s a threat, a proprietary one, particularly when the Colonel’s thumb slides over his larynx, just hard enough..

“No. You don’t know him. You have never known him, and you _will_ never know him.” The Colonel dips his chin slightly and his stare is unwavering and steadfast. He drops his hand and reaches to his belt, off which he pulls a specialized handheld taser.

The Winter Soldier is very familiar with this device. His eyes focus on it immediately.

“We will not be discussing this again, or mentioning this to anyone. You will go to the chopper and you will ride back to base for debriefing. We won’t be repeating this incident, and you will not skip another extraction point, or you will be sent to Vladivostok to be wiped and reprogrammed, which I do not have the time to waste doing. Am I fully understood?”

He nods jerkily, not taking his gaze away from the taser.

“Yes? Yes, what?”

“Yes, Colonel Pierce.”

“Good. Then let’s go.” he steps aside and motions with an open arm in the direction of the helicopter.

The walk to the chopper is quiet, except for the ambient shrill scream of the jungle. They reach the small clearing by the stream, where four soldiers in the Huey are leaning over Reenders on a stretcher, attempting to stabilize him for transport to the nearest field hospital.

He recognizes two of the other agents as well, who are standing outside, keeping a lazy watch. They’ve been in Vietnam with him for four years, and unlike Reenders and his team, they too carry handheld tasers. They are familiar with how to control him, and are unafraid.

Pierce stalks past them, ignoring their salutes.

“Let’s get this bird in the air, I have to be on the phone with Washington at eleven hundred hours.”

He goes to follow, but the two agents step in front of him. One holds up his taser and waggles it.

“See this? Try any of that shit with me and I’ll lay you out.”

He doesn’t move, just waits and doesn’t make eye contact.

They let him pass.

He climbs into the Huey and sits quietly as the men climb in after him. He watches the flapping green curtain of the jungle whip and froth in the propwash of the chopper, ignoring the other people around him as they take off up into the thick, soupy air.

Across from him and on the opposite side of the chopper, Pierce is reading the file, brow furrowed, hands tightly holding all the papers together in the wind.

The pain from his gunshot wounds is a resonant but ignored sensation, present but useless. He knows his body will heal. The bleeding has already stopped.

He looks down into his hand, at the crumpled photo he’d been keeping in the tight ball of his fist.

He feels a sense of both profound calmness and impending doom and panic when he sees the face in the photo. _He is small, he is tall, he is thin, he is broad, he is light, he is heavy, he is, he is heisheisheisheis_

“ ‘Chu got there?” a muzzle of a rifle shoves his hand roughly.

He closes his fist immediately, looking up at the agent across from him from under the sweaty curtain of his hair.

The agent seems to think this act of defiance is funny. He grins and shoves again, the metal sharp against his knuckles.

“Show me.” the agent says.

He just glares. This agent isn’t exactly his handler, especially not when Pierce is right there. But Pierce is occupied by his intel, and the agent has all the authority he needs in his handheld bull-zapper.

The agent pulls said taser out again and holds it up. He’s smirking still.

“Come on. Hand it over, or I’ll zap your dick off and toss it in a bonfire.”

With a shaking hand, he slowly extends the photo. It’s snatched roughly from him, and he’s irrationally angry about this even though he himself had crumpled it first.

The agent looks at it and laughs out loud, a belligerent hoot.

“Hah! Look what he had!” he shows it to the other agent beside him, who laughs too.

“What, you keeping this for your spank bank? Always figured you was a queer.” the agent tosses the photo out the side of the Huey with a flick of his wrist.

With preternatural speed, his hand darts out and snatches the photo out of thin air.

His hand is shaking as he puts the picture into the front of his jacket, the old blood from his chest wound sticky and cold.

The agent is still laughing, shaking his head, delighted by this reaction.

“So what, you fucked him? Or other way around? Bet you liked sucking America’s big red, white and blue dick, eh?”

He leaps at him, direct and precise like a jaguar, and lands on top of him, flesh hand strangling at his throat, metal one making a fist with which to cave his impudent skull in.

The taser hits him in the kidney first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQRIOKvR2WM
> 
> And, if you don't believe me, the gorgeousness that was Robert Redford in 1969: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065079/mediaviewer/rm1420494848


	2. My Darling Young One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and his platoon in Vietnam.

Ⅳ

Steve is napping on his cot in his tent, cap down over his eyes, when he hears someone knock on his tentpole with what he thinks must be a tin spoon or something similar.

“Yeah?” he says, but doesn’t move.

“It’s Colonel Holby, sir. He wants to see you.”

Steve sighs. Nap over.

“Thank you, Corporal. Dismissed.”

He sits up, rights his cap and swings his legs over onto the floor, stretching a bit before getting to his feet. He has to stoop to stop his head hitting the canvas, but he buttons his shirt back up as he goes, pausing inside to finish the last one before he steps out into the punishing sun.

As he knew he would be, Corporal Goertz is still standing there, sweaty and shiny like everyone else, but still bright and ready to go as always, not a uniform violation in sight.

“Thought I dismissed you.” Steve says, buttoning his cuffs.

“Did, sir. Thought I’d keep you company on your walk.”

Steve gives him a look, one the other boys have christened “America’s Hairy Eyeball”, but sees nothing but sincere keenness radiating from every of Goertz’s pores. It’s exhausting, and is even more so when Steve recognizes the same attitude he had himself when he first signed up twenty five years ago.

“Not necessary, corporal.”

“Mess tent is that way anyway, Major. Just saying.”

“Ah.” Steve says, smirking and giving Goertz a friendly shove in that direction, “It all makes sense now.”

They walk across the small temporary camp, past the ramshackle group of men playing a pickup game of soccer, and a team of engineers trying to fix a Jeep. One or two glance their way, but none salute.

Steve is pretty sure he knows why, so it doesn’t bother him in the least.

“We heading out again soon, Major? Other boys been asking is all.”

“Dunno. Probably about to hear from the Colonel. Why, you miss humping so bad you’d give up a few days of precious R&R?” Steve smirks down at Goertz, who is about 5 '7 and slouches to the point he probably should be out on Medical, but nonetheless here he is.

“No, sir. Just, you know. Ansty.”

Steve knows the feeling. “Well, shouldn’t have to wait too long. There’s always another hill or village to take.”

“...and then lose.” Goertz says, glancing at Steve and then out at the hazy orange sun over the jungle.

Steve sighs. “Yeah. Probably.”

They arrive at Colonel Holby’s temporary command tent, and Goertz salutes neatly before he disappears tactfully towards the mess tent. As Steve ducks inside, a staff sergeant and lieutenant are leaning over the map on the large table, pointing at some small village or other. They look up when he eclipses the sunlight, and both immediately glance at each other and step aside, saluting smartly.

Steve salutes at Holby, who is sitting in a chair facing him.

“At ease, Major Rogers. You two, back here in half an hour. Dismissed.”

The two swiftly duck out of the tent, leaving Steve alone with the Colonel.

Holby gets to his feet and rolls his right shoulder, where Steve knows he has an old gunshot wound from Omaha Beach that never healed quite right. He goes to a basin of water in the corner and takes a wet rag from it, placing it dripping on the back of his sunburned neck.

“Just between you and I, Rogers, I am counting the minutes until I get to go back home and lay in a snowbank. This heat is just hell, and it just somehow keeps getting worse.”

Steve nods. “Yessir.”

Holby plops himself back down in his chair, motioning to another a few feet away from Steve.

“Sit, Major. It’s too hot for standing and your posture makes my back ache just looking at you.”

Steve laughs quietly and takes a seat, folding his hands in his lap.

Holby lights a cigarette deftly, not offering one to Steve. He’s learned over the last few months that it’ll always be declined.

“So.” he says, taking a drag and letting out a huge plume of blue smoke, which barely moves in the lazy air, “Was on the horn with Saigon this morning.”

Steve doesn’t sigh, but it’s a near thing. He knew this was coming.

“Let me guess. Someone’s mad at me.”

Holby groans and rubs one eye with his thumb.

“Brass want you sent home. Want you court martialed probably too, but we both know that won’t happen. Can’t be seen to court martial freedom and liberty and whatever.”

Steve just waits. This isn’t anything he hasn’t heard before.

“But,” Holby lets out another giant cloud, “I managed to talk them down. Told them you were overworked at the time, lapse in judgement, your presence is imperative to troop morale yadda yadda yadda. The usual shit.”

Steve frowns, and raises an eyebrow at him. He crosses his arms across his chest.

“Well, none of those things are true. And you’re going to have to stop fighting my battles for me, Holby. I said what I said, and I’d say it again to Nixon’s face while sitting on Henry Kissinger’s lap if I could.”

Holby snorts and shakes his head. “Yeah, well, _I_ know that, but if you plan to stay in-country, you gotta play by at least a few of the rules and butter the right bread, Major.

Steve grunts is acknowledgement and begrudging agreement.

“I said what I felt had to be said. Always have done and always will do.”

“Yeah, fine, but did you have to say it to the BBC? Everyone’s got a hold of it now, front page of the New York Times, Saigon says.”

Steve doesn’t budge or bat an eyelash.

“Like I said; to Nixon’s face on Kissinger’s lap.”

Holby snorts again and takes a puff of his cigarette, letting it dangle from his lips as he talks, “You know, Major, that’s an image I’d have been happier not ever having in my head.”

Steve allows himself a small smile at this, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table.

“So? Have any new marching orders for me, Colonel? I’m ready to go, as are my boys.”

“Matter of fact I do.” Holby shoves the map aside and reveals a handful of scattered missives, shuffling through them until he apparently finds the right one.

“Any good?” Steve asks.

“Thought you would have learned by now, Major Rogers, that you should never ask that question.”

A half hour later, Steve is walking back across camp towards his tent, a map rolled under his arm, dossiers folded inside that. His brain takes up tactical information like a sponge now, crafted for warfare like a tiger for a jungle; he only needs to hear a plan once before he has it embedded in his mind.

He goes past the same groups of men as before, and this time a shirtless PFC sneers at him openly, jerking his chin in Steve’s direction so the others look up. They all do, but some have different looks on their faces. One or two show open contempt, a few, owlish suspicion, and a couple, begrudging admiration. He isn’t a hundred percent sure which he deserves.

He knows his interview with the BBC’s “Man in Saigon” was broadcast live on BBC radio, and knows that it was far more honest and controversial than any of the highly censored material usually said over any other stations, like Radio Saigon. When that reporter had asked him for an interview, he had expected softball questions likely to appease the brass both in country and back home, as well as fall on side with the propaganda messages normally broadcast on military airwaves for servicemen.

Instead, the reporter had looked across the top of his glasses at Steve and said “Steve Rogers, you are not the first in a long line of prominent Americans to denounce the war in Vietnam, but you are certainly in a position not often associated with these denouncements. Can you speak to your prior statements against the war, and about what your position is now?”

And so Steve had told him. The last time he’d been Stateside he’d made offhand comments against not only the war in Vietnam, but also the Nixon administration and their inability and seeming unwillingness to end the war they’d inherited, and he’d said the same things about Linden Johnson before that. But never had his platform been as public, or his words as widely shared as these. He hadn’t spoken overly long, as the technician in the radio booth had looked increasingly nervous with every word Steve uttered, knowing the fury his words would incite.

He had been a symbol of the American dream since 1943, but after V-E Day, then the slavering monster that was the war in the Pacific, then Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then Korea, and now this colossal clusterfuck that was Vietnam, that ‘Amerian dream’ was in Steve’s mind one colossal paper tiger.

He didn’t want to be that mutated, rotting dream anymore, and his platform was too public to be ignored.

He’d ended his interview by telling the reporter that he “didn’t stay in Vietnam to fight the VietCong. I’m staying in Vietnam to ensure as many Americans as possible come home to their mothers and wives and children. I don’t fight for USA. I fight for her soldiers.” And he’d walked out.

Back at his tent, Steve sits on his bed, immediately unbuttoning his shirt and letting air in over his wet skin. The heat doesn’t drain him as much as it does everyone else, and he can get by on a third the amount of water, but he still feels the disgusting drag of the humidity and the squeeze of the infernal ambient air.

“It’s like walking through soup.” his sergeant had said a few weeks ago as they’d hiked through a dense patch of jungle. 

Steve unrolls his map, tracks the line he’s drawn in pencil. It’s about a forty mile hike through dense jungle,through a few rice patties and up a mountain, before reaching a rendezvous with another platoon to take a small village to the west. It’s a bit of a random assignment, but then, he is a Major in charge of a platoon of 16 men, a job usually left to Sergeants. The army doesn’t like him; General Westmoreland had despised him for his refusal to do pro-War propaganda tv and radio spots, and Abrams hates him for similar reasons, as well for Steve’s frank and increasingly public disregard for the War’s validity. 

Not to mention that apparently Nixon regularly goes on furious tirades about him to Whitehouse aides. “Smartass freeloading Communist” was apparently the most recent title he earned. The only reason he’s still allowed to be in Vietnam at all is because of his special dispensation from Eisenhower to stay on on an unlimited deployment had been grandfathered in since Iwo Jima.

There’s a polite cough outside the tent, and Steve recognises it immediately.

“Come in, Rymack.”

His sergeant ducks in the flap of the tent, taking off his cap as he comes.

“We got orders, Cap?”

“Yup. We march out at oh six hundred tomorrow. Let the boys know.”

“Will do.” Rymack wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, his hair heavy with sweat against his forehead.

Steve ignores Rymack calling him “Cap”, as he always does. Like all the sergeants he’s met, Rymack is older than other enlisted men, and like all the older men in the army, knows Steve as Captain, by rank or reputation, not as a Major.

Bucky _hadn’t_ been older than the troop he commanded. In fact, he’d been the second youngest of the 107th, older only than Steve himself. It was his uncanny ability to win over anyone he came across that boosted him up the ranks like a shot… that, and his spectacular ability as a sniper.

Almost unconsciously, Steve’s hand comes up to his chest near his heart, where he has the portrait of Bucky stashed carefully away inside wax paper. It’s been with him since 1945, when Becca had handed it to him, and he’ll have it with him till the day he dies if he can help it.

Rymack isn’t leaving. He’s lingering hesitantly, like someone who has something to say but doesn’t particularly want to say it.

“You need anything else, Sergeant?” Steve says, raising an eyebrow.

“Ah. Well, uh.” Rymack lets out a deep sigh, “there was a kerfuffle in the mess just now. One of the other platoons was ragging on...well, _you_ , Cap. Couple of ours took exception to it, got in a bit of a donnybrook. MPs were after them, but I managed to get everything squared away before any real trouble started.”

Steve frowns at the canvas wall opposite him, but resists planting his face in his hands like he wants to.

He looks at Rymack. “Let me guess. They heard about the BBC interview?”

“Don’t know, but everyone’s talking about it. Hanoi Hannah called you the first honest American soldier.”

Steve really does groan then.

“Great. Just perfect. Exactly what we needed.” Steve takes off his cap and throws it onto his rucksack on the opposite side of his tent, “Well, get them all packed and squared away early then. Confined to quarters until we leave tomorrow so no one gets in any more fights.”

Rymack nods sharply. He goes to leave, but then pauses and turns back quickly.

“You should know, sir...I heard the interview… and I don’t disagree with anything you said. It’s coming up on Valentine’s Day, and I know it’s damn stupid I’m not back home with my Beth.”

Steve gives Rymack a tired smile.

“Thanks, George. I’d rather you be back home with her too, if that’s any consolation.”

“It isn’t, sir, but it’s still nice to know.”

The next day sees Steve and his 16 boys marching through the jungle, M-16s at the ready, skin shining and dripping profusely. Steve always walks ahead, confident a landmine or trip mine would likely do less damage to him than the soft, regular human flesh of his squadmates.

Sometimes they start with mild conversation, but they’re relatively far North now, and as the generals always liked to yell, Charlie could be anywhere. Always though, conversation peters out after about an hour, the heat and general discomfort making talking unpalatable.

The new boys who are assigned to Steve always start with the same starry-eyed hero worship, walking as near him as they can, trying to play cool, but eventually they all crack and ask the same questions.

“Are you really bulletproof?”

“No.”

“Do you heal super fast?”

“Yes.”

“Did you actually punch Hitler?”

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty one.”

“But you look like you’re thirty.”

“Super-soldier serum delays aging.”

“Is it true you can’t get drunk?”

“Yes.”

“What was JFK like?”

“A politician.”

“Where’s the shield?”

“Classified.”

“Will you come meet my mom when we get back stateside?”

“If you behave.”

Eventually, the hero worship morphs into a battle hardened respect for a superior office, but also a mentor they trust to have their best interests at heart. They all know Steve will choose their safety and well being over the completion of a mission, accolades or kill/death ratios.

They also know that any inappropriate behavior will be swiftly and severely punished.

There’d been a situation back in ‘66, when Steve had walked into a hut to find two of his squad preparing to assault a young female farmer. Both men had been thrown through a not thin wall each, dragged by their heels, one in each hand, through the jungle for a kilometer, their clothes ripped off their bodies until they were in just underwear and socks, and tied to a tree directly adjacent to a red ant nest. As the offending men screamed and screamed, Steve had radioed the MPs and requested they come get their prize before the ants ate them. The MPs did eventually arrive... about eight hours later.

Steve lets his squad stop after twenty miles, in a well sheltered and defensible glade near a stream. They all go swimming to rinse off the day’s salt, sweat and dust, and wash their dirtier clothes best they can, despite the fact that the humidity keeps everything at a miserable level of off-damp.

They make a tiny fire, just enough to heat their MREs, before they put it out again to stay as invisible as possible in the thick dark.

As the sun is setting orange and pink, they sit in a close clump, listening to the rumble of incoming thunder and smelling the smoke of distant burning jungle.

Steve is just outside the circle, leaning on a tree and drawing the Brooklyn Bridge for the hundredth time, lines confident and well practiced. A couple corporals and privates are talking quietly, smoking and laughing. They’re trading dirty jokes and snickering, bringing in more and more of the boys around the circle, retelling as they go.

Steve smirks, head still down as he hears a few of the naughtier ones, his enhanced hearing often forgotten about. Finally Goertz, who comes from a poor but very proper disciplinarian family in Arkansas, coughs and Steve sees him jerk his chin in Steve’s direction in a way he probably thinks is surreptitious.

Steve tries not to laugh, and instead says “Don’t be bothered on my account, soldier, I’ve been in and around the army for a quarter century; I’ve heard worse.”

“Told ya he doesn’t care.” says Private Forbes, smirking around his cigarette.

Goertz’s ears are red as he glances at Steve. “If you’re sure, sir.”

“I’m sure. Just don’t go home and tell your Ma any of them and you’ll be fine.”

There’s a smattering of laughter around the clump.

“You got any good ones, Major?” asks Private Hooper brightly, immediately getting a sharp look from Rymack, who looks like he’s about to shout until Steve calms him with a placating glance.

Steve folds away his drawing and sighs, looking up at the sky.

“Uhhhh… let me think. Oh, ha, yeah; back in ‘44 I heard one from an RAF pilot in a pub in Scotland.”

Steve sits up and arranges himself, as all the men around turn to watch him. He clears his throat and begins.

“Here’s a whale of a tale about Moby Dick,

An unfortunate lad with a corkscrew prick,

He was forever on the hunt,

For a lady with a corkscrew cunt.

When he finally found her, he fell down dead,

As his fair lady love had a left-hand thread.”

There’s about three full seconds of silence, until suddenly the entire clump bursts into hysterical laughter, building and building until even Rymack is wiping tears from his eyes and clutching his middle.

Steve can’t help but grin, opening his drawing and setting pencil to paper once more.

They find the tiny village around mid-afternoon, the tired troops taking refuge in the one large remaining non-burned out thatched house. There is no sign of the squad they are supposed to meet, but they made good time and are ahead of schedule, so are content to wait in what little shade there is.

Steve sweeps the entire town himself and a squad of four, looking for foxholes. He’s learned from experience that even the most abandoned seeming town can be anything but.

They scan the overgrown rice patties, abandoned and left to grow untended. There’s a dead buffalo on it’s side in one of them, a bullet hole in its forehead, body so bloated with gas that its legs stick straight out. Even from a hundred yards away, they can hear the flies and smell the rot.

“I’ll give you a week’s smokes ration if you go poke that thing.” says Corporal Cortez, who’s smirking at Corporal Anderson.

“Yeah, fuck that, _thanks_.” replies Anderson, flipping a rusty barrel lid hidden in the grass with his toe.

They both have their guns up, heads swivelling, like Steve’s taught them, and are well trained yet conscientious and cautious soldiers. Steve trusts them, and he knows they trust him.

They circle back to the thatched house when Steve’s sure that indeed there are no signs of recent activity, ducking into the dark interior. The boys have reignited the small cooking fire, and are reheating some canned corn in a dented and blackened tin pot.

Over in the corner, the Radiotelephone Officer is talking into the receiver of his heavy radio pack. Steve approaches him and hears him tell HQ that no rendezvous had been made, and Steve squats beside him, taking the receiver.

“This is Major Rogers- I’ll give them till nightfall, but then I’m heading back to basecamp, over.”

“ _Please verify, your squad is at meeting point Alpha-Two-Oscar-Kilo_ , _Major Rogers? Over.”_

“We are, and we’re waiting to meet up with Delta-Niner-Three squad, over.”

“ _Please standby and remain at meeting point, over and out.”_

Steve hands the RTO back the receiver, patting him on the shoulder as he stands.

“We wait?” Asks Sergeant Rymack, who’s leaning on the wall nearby.

“Sounds like it. Settle in but stay ready.” Steve says, heading out the low door.

“So? We sitting around for Charlie target practice?” Corporal Anderson says around a freshly lit cigarette.

Steve shoulders his own rifle, wiping sweat off his brow.

“For now. I want you and Cortez stationed out here, keep an ear out, don’t stray too far, you know the drill.”

They both salute, and Steve takes his helmet off, slicking his soaked hair back. He sets his rifle down, butt first, and leans it on his thigh, then squints into the sunlight, taking in the thick jungle around the muddy clearing. 

And it’s then that he hears the noise.

“Hey, Major, boys wanna know if you wanna eat-” Private Goertz is coming out of the shack, keen and thoughtful as always.

Steve holds up a hand, silencing Goertz, alarm immediately blooming onto his face when he sees Steve staring off into the middle distance, almost right into the sun.

“Major?” Goertz says, voice betraying his fear.

It’s a low, rumbling growl, distant and coming closer, accompanied by the shrieking sound of air being ripped apart.

It’s a very familiar noise in Vietnam.

“Can you hear that?” Steve says quietly, shading his eyes and looking over the trees in search of the source of the sound.

Goertz frowns and appears to listen for a few seconds.

“Is that...it sounds like a plane. B-52 maybe?”

Steve swivels his head around. Anderson and Cortez have heard it too and are looking for the plane, likewise shading their eyes. 

Steve can hear the high pitched scream now, the rending squeal of the engines and the rippling gurgle as it carves the sky. It’s coming closer and closer, and he still can’t see it.

Something in his chest, the sixth sense gifted to him by Dr. Erskine, is tensing in warning, ready to spring into action. He almost reaches for a shield that hasn’t been on his back in over 20 years.

And then Steve sees it; it had been hiding in the sun, impossible to look directly at. It’s coming in low, and Steve’s enhanced eyes can see it clearly now as it swings closer to the tops of the trees.

It's a Forward Air Control plane, the plane responsible for spotting targets for the supersonic F-100 Super Sabers, whose jet engines are ripping a hole in the sound barrier, and he still can't see them but can hear them with every molecule of his being.

Every muscle in his body tenses, and his brain, tactically enhanced, knows immediately that he has almost no time to react.

“Run!” he yells, backing a few steps as the plane careens closer, “Run!”

Cortez and Anderson don’t hesitate, immediately sprinting in the direction Steve points.

The noise of the jets is now deafening, and Steve grabs Goertz by the arm and half shoves, half throws him ahead, running beside him.

Steve looks over his shoulder as the first of a cluster of bombs fall from the belly of a jet plane, and what he sees makes his whole body go cold.

The tumbling cannisters of firebombs.

Napalm.

The splash of jellied flame hits the mud clearing, erupting into a gigantic, boiling orange cloud that engulfs the entire clearing, swarming up trees in columns of raging fire. The world narrows into just this calamity, into the horror unfolding behind him.

Steve feels the heat on the back of his neck as he runs, scooping an arm behind Goertz and almost carrying him along. He can hear nothing over the howl of the plane and the roar of the exploding blaze, but he still screams to keep running.

He comes to a stumbling halt at the tree line, with Anderson and Cortez lagging behind them. They are wide eyed with terror, their weapons dropped in favor of speed.

Steve whirls around desperately, looking into the clearing that once was a village, but is now an infernal hellscape. He can’t even see through the fire to glimpse the wreckage of the building that housed the rest of his entire squad.

His entire squad. Burned alive.

“I-” Steve says, his voice failing him, cracking apart in his mouth.

He stares at the fire, incomprehension and disbelief rendering him paralyzed.

He doesn’t see the second wave of Super Saber jets until it’s overtop of them, and he feels more than sees Goertz tackle his frozen frame to the ground.

As Steve falls to the forest floor, he registers the screaming terror of Anderson and Cortez’s rictus faces, the exact colour of the underside of the palm fronds above them, and the flash of orange light exploding around him in perfect detail.

And for some reason, the thing he thinks before the explosion renders him unconscious is

_I’m sorry, Buck._

The pain wakes him up.

It’s all-consuming and desperate, and he lurches awake all at once, gasping and sitting up from a prone position on his back, panting raggedly.

His eyes are gritty, his mouth full of what tastes like ashes, and his throat is on fire.

But what hurts most, and is occluding his world, his life, his _brain_ , is what feels like a patch of sizzling acid along the right side of his jaw and throat, over his neck onto his chest and shoulder and down his back.

Steve is whimpering, he can hear himself but can’t stop, and he tries to lift his right hand to feel the spot on his neck but the shift in his shoulder makes the pain become astronomical and he gags immediately, mouth flooding with spit.

It feels like fresh, glowing liquid lava has been poured onto him from above.

He looks down at himself as best he can, panting raggedly. He is covered head to toe in black soot and ash, and his clothes have been burned in many places.

He can see, just at the edge of how far he can look down before gagging again, that there is a hole in his shirt, burned clear away, and underneath is just… flesh. Burned, charred flesh, like meat on an overheated barbeque.

His flesh.

Steve finds himself crying out in agony, eyes squeezing shut and already streaming with tears from the smoke and ash.

He sags back to the ground, chest rising and falling rapidly.

He doesn’t want to die here. But he feels like he might. Like he may not have an option.

He reaches up with his left hand and tries to feel where the pain is most invasive, where it feels hottest and most raw and melted away.

The side of his neck is sticky and hot, and touching it makes him really vomit this time, sitting up abruptly and emptying his stomach of its meagre contents.

He blinks and gasps, trying to clear his vision, not daring to move his head to look around.

As much as he can hazily, grittily focus, the clearing is burned into nothingness.

The ground is made of unrecognizable black charcoal and smoke rising in greasy black and blue plumes, and Steve coughs raggedly, wheezing with pain as his burns are pulled by the movement. He spits out bile and smoke and ash.

He has been laying in an unburned island of long grass, a broken tree resting next to him likewise not destroyed by fire but still scorched in places. The rest of the palm forest has been burned, some of the trees still snapping and popping with stored heat.

Steve looks around, still dragging in rough lungfuls of ashen air, squinting as more smoke and dust blows into his eyes. The ruined houses are all burned down, including the one his entire squad had been in.

There’s no sign of even the walls of the hut, let alone bodies.

He knows he has to get up. Has to move. He can’t sit here forever and wait for some North Vietnamese soldiers to find him and shoot him, no matter how badly he wants to sink back onto the grass and let it swallow him up.

With first one leg and then the other, he manages to get onto his knees, left hand supporting his upper body, right cradled against his chest so as not to move the skin.

He can see places on his hand that had clearly been burned, but like his usual wounds, are already most of the way to being healed, the skin taut and shiny pink. His clothing is burned away on one leg, and the skin underneath is similarly on its way to being healed closed.

When he glances at his right bicep, he can see the bottom edge of the screamingly painful burn, and there’s no sign of his accelerated healing factor even existing, let alone fixing the wound.

Wobbling, stumbling and shaking with pain, Steve gets to his feet, his eyes running with ash and tears. He takes a few shaking steps and catches himself on the broken tree, mouth hanging open as he breathes.

And when he looks down, he sees Goertz.

He’s sprawled face down on the grass, his skin and clothes melted together.

And when Steve falls to his knees next to him, he can hear him breathing.

“Goertz! G- Michael! Micheal!” Steve forgets his own pain, horror immediately replacing everything else. Gingerly, he rolls Goertz’s body over, revealing the worst of the burns cover his front as well, and the skin on his face is blistered and puckered.

Goertz makes a little noise, groaning and shifting slightly. His eyelids flicker.

“Michael. It’s me. It’s Steve. It’s Major Rogers, I’m here. Stay with me, stay with me Michael, please.” Steve begs, trying to find a place to touch him to comfort him that isn’t burned. He fails.

Goertz groans again and his eyes open a tiny crack.

“M….mmmMajor?” he croaks, his voice a dry wisp.

“Yeah it’s me. It’s me, Goertz. I found you. I’ve got you.” Steve says, trying to meet his unfocused bloodshot eyes. His own hands are shaking so hard he clenches them into fists so he can’t accidentally stick his filthy fingers into raw flesh.

“Mmm...mmm’ glad you’re...kay.” Goertz says, and his blackened lips almost smile.

Steve can’t stop the tears of anguish now. They are coming down his cheeks in wobbly tracks laden with ash.

He remembers Goertz tackling him out of the way of the falling napalm bombs, landing on top of Steve.

Shielding him.

“ _Why would you do that?_ ” Steve whispers, and a tear falls off the end of his nose. He leans closer and gently brushes Goertz’s singed hair from his face.

Goertz makes a rough gurgle which Steve realizes is a disbelieving laugh.

“...you’re...Capn...merica.” he says, as if the answer is so simple.

Steve whimpers and closes his eyes, chin falling to his chest.

Steve picks up Goertz and puts him gently over his unburned shoulder. He vaguely remembers the map he’d been studying two days prior in Holby’s tent, and he relies on his foggy yet nearly eidetic memory to point him in the right direction. He remembers there being a smaller ARVN encampment fifteen miles from this town, straight south.

He walks into the jungle, away from the enormous pillar of smoke rising into the orange sky like a colossal languorous snake.

He can feel himself dissociating from his body, feel his mind drifting and every few minutes he finds himself gasping into lucidity as if he’d fallen asleep, shocked to find he’s still walking, one foot after the other. The pain of his entire body is throbbing with his heartbeat, low and banked but still present. He grips Goertz’s legs, and his fingers stick to his skin in a sickening manner, but he hardly registers it.

He walks for hours, his skin no longer sweating, the green haze in front of him wavering in and out of focus. All he can hear is his footfalls on leaflitter and his own uneven breathing. He’s reminded of when he had pneumonia and bronchitis back in ‘36 and Bucky’d told him he sounded like a set of broken bagpipes being played by deaf Scot with TB.

He finds himself choking out a deranged laugh, bumping into a tree trunk.

Over his shoulder, he hears Goertz groan quietly and Steve is snapped back into the here-and-now.

“We’re...we’re almost there. Almost there. Just hang on.” Steve says, with no basis for this statement. He starts walking again, legs moving without him feeling them do so.

After another hour of walking, he hears a terribly welcome noise- the sound of a helicopter.

Wheezing with joy and relief and agony, he looks up into the sky and sees the underside of a medical chopper skim the top of the trees, its red cross bright against the green belly. He sees it twist and slow as if to land, just beyond the next rise of trees.

Steve staggers through the thick and knotted underbrush, vines and heavy wet leaves slapping at his face, at his burned skin and shaking legs.

He breaks through the treeline and onto the edge of a large clearing; a helicopter landing area, next to what appears to be a MASH, along with a host of other smaller green tents. People are moving around, and he can vaguely hear music and smell cooking food.

Someone shouts and Steve sees a person near the helicopter point at him from about fifty yards away.

“Help.” Steve says, and his knees give way.

Ⅴ

He wakes up to the sound of women’s voices, and it’s so strange that he has to concentrate for a full minute before he realizes he must be in a medical tent.

One woman has an endearing southern accent, and the other sounds like she could be from California. They are speaking quietly, as is the manner of nurses, and he can feel gentle hands on him.

He tries to feign continued unconsciousness, but it’s difficult when they dab at the furious burns on his right shoulder and neck.

“You sure he’s Captain America?” says the Californian one.

“Of course he is! Ain’t you never seen pictures of him?”

“Well I mean sure I have, but I wasn’t prepared for all _this_.” he thinks he can hear her waving a hand around him, “I mean _gosh,_ he’s just so...so...”

“Handsome?”

“ _So_ handsome. And those shoulders, _those arms;_ Christmas, but isn’t he built like one of those fancy Italian statues.”

Steve used to cringe when women discussed his body in such an outwardly desirous manner, but he’d become more used to it over the last few decades. Even Peggy hadn’t been immune to the muscular charm the serum had gifted him; he still perfectly remembers the blush across her cheeks and the seemingly unthinking way she’d touched his chest as soon as he’d emerged from the Vita-Ray chamber.

“I’ll let you know now; I had a big ol’ crush on Captain America when I was a little girl. Had a big poster by my bed, and I’d stare at it before I went to sleep every night.”

He hears the other woman snicker quietly at that, and they fall silent for a while as they dab at other burns, which he can feel by the tickling, itching sensation are well on their way to being healed.

One of the nurses wipes something cold and damp across his chest, right over his heart, and in a sudden, horror filled moment, Steve realizes his shirt is gone.

He lurches upright, eyes flying open, both women yelping and careening backwards in surprise, the trays around them scattering every which way.

“My shirt!” Steve yells, head whipping side to side, looking on the clean concrete floor around his little bed, “Where’s my shirt?”

The nurses are both wide eyed with shock, one holding a strip of gauze, the other holding a crumpled bottle of betadine soap, oozing dark red-brown bubbles out of her clenched hand.

Steve swallows and tries again.

“I’m sorry, really, but my shirt. The shirt I came in wearing, where is it?”

One nurse looks at the other, and then points at the small garbage bin nearby.

“It’s at the bottom.” she says. She has thick red hair, and a southern accent, and her shirt says ‘Roberts’ on it.

Steve lifts his legs and tries to pivot as if to get up, but his shoulder explodes in agony and he feels all the blood drop from his face. For the first time since he was 113 pounds and five foot five, he sees stars immediately exploding in front of his eyes.

“No _, no_ , you stay down, I’ll get it for you.” says the Californian nurse, whose name patch says ‘Cartwright’.

Nurse Roberts starts to pick up the spilled items from the floor as Nurse Cartwright dumps out the little trash can. First comes a large quantity of soiled gauze, some bloody, some with the clear fluid of a burn, and finally, out falls his singed, bloody shirt.

She picks it up in her gloved hands and brings it over, carefully placing it in his lap.

“We saved your patches and bars, if that’s what you’re worried about.” she says.

Steve ignores her, dread making him single minded and panicked. He uses his left hand to fumble through the tatters, fingers shaking as they seek out their intended target. There’s IV leads trailing from the back of his hand, making the search more difficult.

He finally feels the smooth, comforting texture of wax paper against his fingertips, and he withdraws the carefully folded square envelope from the interior breast pocket.

It’s a little singed, a little crumpled, and there’s blood smeared on it, but it’s intact.

Steve clutches it to his chest and lets himself fall back onto the bed, the relief so profound he can’t help but let out a long breath.

If nothing else, he still has this.

“You okay now?” says Nurse Cartwright, looking vaguely annoyed, “Can we get back to our job?”

“Yes.” Steve says, tucking the envelope under his pillow and sitting back up gingerly, “Yes. Sorry.”

The two nurses come back to sit on either side of him, perched on the edge of his bed. Nurse Roberts takes his hand and turns his wrist, exposing the raw but healing skin on the underside, and begins to unwind a gauze roll.

“I wouldn’t waste the supplies if I were you. That’ll be healed by morning.” Steve tells her, and she blinks at him.

“You sure, Capta- uh, Major? If the head nurse comes in here and sees an untreated wound, I may as well jump in front of a Jeep.”

Steve glances at Nurse Cartwright, who is organizing a tray of scissors and scalpels, and she nods in agreement.

Steve sighs. “Alright. Fine. But don’t worry too much about it.”

“We’ll keep running your IV fluids overnight. Unless you spontaneously are able to make yourself rehydrated as well?” Nurse Cartwright says, giving him a look.

Steve can’t help the humorless huff of laughter.

“No. The IV can stay. It’ll help me heal faster than without.”

Nurse Cartwright leans in and examines his right shoulder, which Steve has a hard time looking at. It feels like it’s still actively burning, as if he were to listen carefully enough, he could hear it sizzling like meat on a grill.

“What about this big one? It isn’t healing at all like these other ones, and it’s dirty.”

Steve closes his eyes and sighs around the pain.

“Clean it. Do what you would normally do. It’ll heal; they always do.”

She nods and pivots back to her tray of instruments, picking up a vial and needle, preparing to load it. Steve grits his jaw.

“Save it. Painkillers don’t work. Just clean it.”

Nurse Cartwright looks doubtful, but puts the vial and needle back down. “You sure?”

“Yup.”

She swallows, but picks up the saline solution and a gauze pad and leans in, looking at his face and then back at the wound where it splashes down his chest.

“This is going to hurt a lot.”

“It hurt a lot when it happened, and I survived that.” Steve says, and focuses on a point on the opposite wall, both hands in tight fists.

She was right- it does hurt. A lot.

Every gentle swipe with the gauze both stings like swaths of acid and aches like a freshly broken bone, deep into his flesh. He starts to sweat and breath heavily through his nose, but doesn’t take his eyes off his focal point.

Nurse Roberts joins in the cleaning, tipping his body forward to clean the burn where it goes down over his scapula, and he starts to shake with the combined points of searing pain. He only barely stops himself from gagging. He makes tight fists in the scratchy wool blanket.

The nurses work quickly, faces pale and eyes owlish at his reaction, but professional and efficient to the last. They clean the wound where it drops over his deltoid onto his upper bicep and tricep, and where it goes up over his collar bone to the right side of his throat and to just under his jaw in a long, thin stripe.

By the time they’re done cleaning, Steve is shivering and slicked in sweat. They spread thinned petroleum jelly carefully over the raw flesh and lightly wrap the burn in delicate fabric that won’t stick to the ruined skin, methodical and quick about their task.

As they finish up, Steve finds it in himself to ask.

“Where am I? This isn’t a regular MASH ward.”

“Oh. No, this is a special ward. Colonel Pierce insisted you be placed here, not in the regular ward with the enlisted men.” says Nurse Cartwright.

That explains the curtains dividing Steve’s section into a private room, and the lack of external noises.

“He needn’t have gone to the trouble. I’m just a soldier.” Steve says, looking down at his heavily bandaged limbs. He’s in just his white army-issued briefs; one burn went well over his knee on to his thigh, but is already puckering at the edge as it heals.

“You can take it up with him, I’m sure he’ll be in here soon to talk to you.”

Steve watches as the nurses gather their materials, eyelids feeling heavy, even though the adrenaline from the pain is still coursing through his blood.

And then he remembers.

“Wait! The soldier I was carrying- where is he? How is he?”

The nurses both hesitate, and they look at each other.

Nurse Roberts comes back over to him and puts a careful, gentle hand on his unburned shoulder.

“Major-” she says, her mouth tight.

“No.” Steve insists, looking from one face to the other, “No. He was alive. I’d just heard him breathing when I found this place. He’s alive. His name is Corporal Michael Goertz. He’s from Arkansas, he’s _alive_ , he has to be.”

“I’m so sorry, Major Rogers.” says Nurse Cartwright, with her arms full of supplies and her face a well-practiced mask.

Steve sinks back into his bed, eyes staring at the ceiling.

“But he was alive.” he says quietly to the stained concrete.

He listens to the nurses leave, listens to the scrape of metal on metal as they sweep the green curtains aside and then back again behind them.

He waits for a count of ten, and then reaches up behind his head with his good arm, finding the wax paper envelope stashed under the pillow.

He carefully balances it, taking some time to orient it in his hand on his right side, unable as he is to rotate his elbow, using his other to gently pry back the folded edge, exposing the slightly yellowed linen drawing paper inside.

His hands are still shaking, so the portrait comes sliding out faster than expected. He lets it fall onto his bandaged chest and eases it unfolded with his fingers, opening it to the world, and seeing it gives him just as much pain as it always does.

Bucky still looks as gorgeous as he did when it was drawn, just as beautiful as he did on that day in France when Steve had let him rip the drawing out of his sketchbook. His brow is just as noble, his mouth just as perfectly formed, his eyes still the most incredible shape, and the angle of his jaw just as proud.

If Steve concentrates hard, he can imagine Bucky starting to laugh, his lips sliding into that easy wide grin, the sides of his eyes crinkling deep, the blue of his irises sparkling with delight. He’d smiled less after Steve had rescued him from Zola’s lab, making each one afterwards as precious as a natural pearl.

Steve misses him so much he can hardly breathe for the pain deep in his chest.

He wipes the inevitable wetness from under one eye and gently refolds the portrait, tucking it back into its safe wax paper.

He drops his head back onto the thin pillow behind his head and lets his eyes slip closed, pressing the little package tight over his heart, praying to no God in particular that it be given even the tiniest sliver of the life that lay beneath it.

In 1953, less than a month after Steve got home from Korea, Peggy had called him at his apartment in New York..

“I’m getting married.” she’d told him, her voice as gentle and kind as always, but slightly hesitant as if she were breaking bad news.

They hadn’t seen each other in almost two years, and still Steve had to swallow the surge of jealousy, and then the guilt with the realization of the wild invalidity of that envy.

Peggy had a life. She had a purpose, a job, a _drive_ that put every man around her to shame. She was spearheading an intelligence agency of her own devising, she knew presidents and prime ministers and more than one King.

She deserved better than an emotional black hole like Steve, who ran off to war because he could hardly stand to look at his own reflection in the mirror.

“Can I meet him? Not that you need me to sign off, of course.” Steve had replied, and he heard her laugh to herself on her side of the line.

“So _noble_. Of course you can meet him, why do you think I called?”

“To invite me to the wedding so I could make a big dramatic scene.”

She laughed out loud this time, and Steve could hear her smiling at him.

“You’re atrocious. Next weekend, I’ll book us a table.”

Her fiance was everything Steve wished he was himself.

When they shook hands, he was almost a head shorter than Steve, about a foot narrower across the shoulders, and he was effortlessly charming and looked so comfortable in his own skin that Steve couldn’t even dislike him if he tried to.

“Brian Williamson.” he said, beaming big and easy, “It’s an honor to meet you, Captain Rogers. Actually, to be honest, I met you once in Paris in ‘45, but you also met about a thousand other GIs that day, so I’ll forgive you for not remembering.”

They sat at a gorgeous table at an incredibly fancy restaurant, with a wine list three pages long. The waiter recognized Steve and became a bit gormless if not slightly winded, and was replaced by a much older and more austere one almost immediately.

Peggy and Brian had made eyes at each other often, and were clearly at ease with one another in a manner Steve didn’t think he and Peggy had ever been, even in their hayday. Brian was an accountant, and apparently cared little to not at all about the caché of Peggy’s job.

“She doesn’t need me to be proud of her. But I am.” he said, and winked at Peggy across the table, and she had rolled her eyes but blushed nonetheless.

By the time there were finished dessert, Steve had no reservations at all about Brian, but rather could feel with every ticking second the yawning, churning emptiness in himself where love, _that_ love, could have been. Had he ever had it? Did he even remember what it had felt like?

After paying the tab, much to Steve’s protestation, Brian had got to his feet and pushed in his chair.

“I’m going to head home, leave you two to catch up.” he stooped to kiss Peggy’s cheek, whisper something quick into her ear that made her smile a secret smile, and then left them.

Steve had sighed at her. “He didn’t have to do that.”

“No. He didn’t. And I didn’t ask him to. But he did it anyway, which is why I love him.”

Steve had nodded, looking at his hands where they were fiddling with his napkin.

“I’m so happy for you, Pegs. He’s great. You guys will be amazing together.”

Peggy just stared at him, her enormous brown eyes studying him, cutting to the quick just like they always had.

“I’m worried about you, Steve.” she said.

Steve had just smiled as genuinely as he could.

“You don’t gotta- super soldier, remember? I’m practically bulletproof.”

“You certainly are _not_ bulletproof. And that isn’t what I mean. I’m worried that you’re… lost.” she put her hand on his, her thumb stroking the back of his hand. “You’ve got that haunted look, where you seem like you’ve got nothing solid to hold on to.”

God, he’d forgotten how she _knew_ him. How quickly she could read him, how easily. Steve Rogers was a book she knew cover to cover, footnotes and all.

“I… I’m trying, Peggy. Really I am.” he tried to sound sure.

“Have you got anyone? Someone you can really count on to be there, someone to stand behind you no matter what.”

Steve had laughed dryly then, giving her a look.

“I was in Korea for two years. Not exactly a lot of time for _fraternizing_.”

“That isn’t what I mean and you know it.” Her gaze was sharp. “I mean someone who _loves you,_ Steve. Someone _you_ love.”

 _He’s dead and you know that_.

He almost said it, but swallowed it hard. It had come up from the depths of him, uncontrolled and angry, and it wanted out of his mouth.

“I’ll be fine, Peggy.” he said, feeling his bruised soul freeze over in self defence, “Let me be stateside for at least a few weeks before you start asking about my love life.”

“Doesn’t have to be _that_ kind of love life.” Peggy said, and tilted her head at him, “You know; you should go see Howard.”

Steve balked.

He hadn’t seen that coming.

“He… we didn’t part on the best of terms last time.”

Because Steve had learned of Howard’s role in the Manhattan Project and been so disgusted he’d barely restrained himself from throttling the man.

“That doesn’t matter. It’s been eight years. He’s just as lost as you are, probably more considering his destructive personal habits. And if you both insist on staying lost, then you can at least be lost together.”

Steve had snorted at this

“I’ll think about it.”

And two months later, he had arrived on Howard Stark’s driveway in Malibu, sunglasses shading his eyes from the harsh California sun.

It was an enormous house, sprawling and landscaped within an inch of its life, and there were no less than three Italian sports cars parked under an open walled garage. Steve jogged up the long sloping steps to the front door and knocked.

He waited.

No one answered.

He glanced around for the doorbell and pressed it, hearing it echo throughout the house.

Still, no one answered.

He was about to turn and get back in his car, drive back to his hotel and tell Peggy he’d tried, really, but it just wasn’t going to happen, when he heard faint voices, coming from what seemed to be the backyard.

Steve sighed to himself.

Well, he might as well try.

He cut through the meticulously maintained foliage around the entranceway and came up to an enormous fence, solid wood and eight feet high.

No problem.

He hopped it with ease, landing on soft grass beyond. The backyard was just as groomed, with perfectly formed shrubs and tidy flower planters in many colours.

There was also an enormous pool, complete with swim up bar, attached jacuzzi, fountain and stone grotto island.

And, as he’d expected, there was also Howard Stark.

In an elegant Japanese silk kimono, open to show his bare chest.

And a welding mask.

Holding a welding torch in one hand and a bottle of VSOP in the other.

He had a small workbench in front of him, made of two bar stools, and was apparently welding two pieces of chrome together.

Lounging in the pool in bikinis were two women, both ludicrously gorgeous, and Howard was speaking to them animatedly, waving the unlit welding torch around as emphasis.

Steve cleared his throat loudly, and Howard spun on his heel, housecoat whirling.

He stared for three full seconds.

“Ho-lee _shit_.” he said, his voice tinny from behind the mask.

He used the torch to push it up over his face, revealing wide eyes and his ubiquitous mustache.

“Howard.” Steve said, giving him a lazy salute by way of greeting.

Howard blinked several times, and then looked back at the lady’s, gesturing at Steve now with both the torch wand and the VSOP.

“Uh, ladies, may I present, my close friend and ally, Steve Rogers, aka Captain America _himself_.”

Steve smiled back as the women waved little waves, not completely sure if it was even safe to look at them. There was a _lot_ of skin on display.

“Steve!” his attention was snapped back to Howard, who put down the torch but not the bottle and advanced, arms outstretched, “You’re here! In Malibu! Why in the _hell_ are you here in Malibu?”

Steve let Howard hug him, clapping him roughly on the back like everyone did. What was it about Steve’s back that made men want to pat it like you would a big dog?

“Uh, well. To… see you, actually.”

Howard pulled back, and he narrowed his shrewd dark eyes as he examined Steve’s face.

“Peggy got to you, didn’t she.”

Steve tried not to make any facial expression and failed.

“Knew it.” Howard spun again in a blur of silk, approaching a tiki bar under a nearby pergola awning, “That Pegs of ours, always meddling in everyone’s affairs. Meddle, meddle, _meddle_. And never in a fun way. I’m making the girls gin martinis, you want one?”

Steve coughed and waved his hand, trying to remember how he kept up with Howard’s constant stream of about six trains of thought at once. “No, thank you. Waste of liquor.”

“Ah, it’s the good stuff, you’ll like it. It’s English. Not unlike our illustrious puppet mistress.”

Howard took off his helmet and placed it on a bar stool with a _clank_ , and Steve could see the dark circles under his eyes, along with the pinched sallowness of the chronically sleep deprived.

Steve was struck with both concern and vindication at once, seeing the state the other man had gotten himself into. Steve was nothing if not empathetic to a fault, but he also felt in the darker, more black and white parts of his soul that Howard deserved his suffering.

Steve had cleared his throat, frowning at himself and the world around him, ducking under the pergola shade.

“So, what?” Howard said, voice pitched considerably lower, just for Steve’s ears, “Are you here to talk me off a ledge? Or is that what I’m supposed to be doing to you? I should tell you; I don’t have a lot of ledge-talking left in me these days.”

Steve crossed his arms across his chest and leaned on a fake Corinthian column.

“I think she thinks we’re both out a ledge and are pretending like we’re there to talk when we’re actually there to jump.”

Howard snorted and closed his cocktail shaker, the ice rattling around inside as he shook it vigorously, clacking like machine gun fire. He pulled out four martini glasses and deftly filled them in a continuous line of liquid, before opening a jar of nearby cocktail olives and stabbing into them with toothpicks in a well-practiced motion, dropping them into the glasses, two each.

Steve watched him as he worked, watched his downturned face and set jaw.

“You sleeping well lately, Howard?”

Howard froze for an almost undetectable second, and then picked up two of the martinis. He met Steve’s gaze, his face uncharacteristically hard and pinched.

“What do you fucking think?” he said dryly, and then with a natural showman’s grace so unerring and entire that it challenged even Charlie Chaplin, he broke out into a giant smile, all panache, and stepped out from under the pergola, approaching the women in the pool. “Ladies! Your drinks, as promised. Dry as a bone.”

He returned to the tiki bar and picked up the remaining two glasses, holding one out to Steve, who hesitated and then took it carefully.

Howard toasted him, the nasty sarcasm back in his mannerisms.

“To you, Cap, and your unimpeachable moral compass. May it never point at me.”

He threw back the entire martini in one swallow, dark eyes on Steve as Steve sipped his, and then put the glass down with a hard _click_.

The gin and vermouth grated on Steve’s tongue. He’d never developed a taste for cocktails.

“Howard…” Steve started.

“How was Korea?” Howard said loudly, voice cutting across Steve’s effortlessly.

Steve watched his face, just as Howard watched his.

“How do you think it was?” Steve replied carefully.

“Fucking hell on Earth, I’d imagine.”

Steve took another small sip of the martini, and then put it down on the bar.

“You imagine correctly.”

“Oh, well, but you _gotta go,_ right? Gotta fight those bullies wherever they might be.” Unpleasant sarcasm was dripping off his words in great gobs, “Maybe in an honest bout of fisticuffs, eh?”

Steve clenched his jaw, and he could see the challenge on Howard’s face, in his squared shoulders.

“I didn’t come here to fight with you, Howard. I swear I didn’t.”

“You sure? Last time I saw you, you picked me up by the throat with one hand and slammed me into a wall in front of thirteen world class physicists and told me I was a monster not deserving of the air I breathe.” Howard gave a horrible humorless smile, “So maybe _I_ want to fight with _you_.”

Steve didn’t move, just grit his teeth and stared back as Howard glared at him.

Finally, Steve said, his voice careful and toneless, “If you want me to go, I can go. I can tell Peggy I never saw you, that we were passing ships in the night, and we can move on with our lives as we are.”

“Or?” Howard snapped, crossing his silk wrapped arms across his narrow chest.

“Or, if you want, you can punch me.”

Howard blinked.

“Punch you.” He repeated, clearly taken aback.

“Right here. In front of these women. You, Howard Stark, can punch Captain America in the face. If you think it’ll help assuage that guilt I can see crawling around inside you, you can get me back for emasculating you in front of your mass murdering colleagues, and pretend like aren’t one of them.”

Howard snarled at him and whipped around the tiki bar, storming right up to Steve, fury radiating off him in tectonic waves. His fists were balled, chest heaving, nostrils flared.

“ _You think I’m happy about what happened?_ ” Howard hissed, his voice a shaky rasp, “ _You think I’m proud of what I was a part of_?”

“No, I don’t. And neither am I. But we are what war made us. Both of us, equally.”

Howard’s incandescent rage held for a few seconds longer, before he sagged visibly.

He still stared into Steve’s eyes.

“What, you ain’t proud of the fact we made you into a Nazi killing machine? What is it _you_ did, huh, that you regret so much?”

“It’s not what I did. It’s everything I couldn’t do. All the things I couldn’t stop.” Steve replied flatly, unable to really look Howard in the eye as he said it.

Howard stared at him for a while longer, eyes darting all over his face, searching for a lie.

He walked back around behind the bar, placing both hands flat on the counter top, and then slowly balled them up, soundlessly bouncing one fist on the counter a few times, before reaching out and picking up Steve’s abandoned martini.

He took a big swig and placed the glass beside his empty one.

“So while _I’m_ haunted by the things I _did do_ , you’re haunted by all the things you _didn’t_. What a pair we make, eh?” the corner of his lips twitched up into a smirk.

“Make more sense why Peggy sent me down here?” says Steve, smiling slowly back.

“Mm, yes, I’m starting to get more of a picture I think.”

Steve stayed with Howard for over a year after that.

Both were called away to DC, to New York, to Los Angeles, for weeks or months at a time, but they stayed in one another’s orbit.

Howard distracted Steve from his doubts and regrets with his constant stream of dialog and outlandish ideas, and Steve acted as a sturdy presence to anchor Howard in the real world. They couldn’t stew in their own guilt when there were too busy trying to assuage the other of theirs.

Steve refused any and all noxious PR stunts, instead choosing to appear on talk shows or radio programs where he could say what he wanted, not what was written for him.

Howard attended almost all of them with him, standing behind the camera or in the sound booth window, and smiling around his cigar in a manner that never ceased to be reassuring.

Steve met movie stars, infamous singers and starlets. It’s thanks to Howard’s influence he got to meet Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., John Wayne, James Dean and Marlon Brando, and also why he has a signed photo of Marilyn Monroe kissing his cheek. She likewise has the same photo, signed by him.

They went to Peggy’s wedding together, and Howard’s perennial good humor was the exact balm Steve needed to make it through the night without once falling into the tempting trap of nostalgic melancholy.

He and Peggy danced a few times throughout the night, but always he handed her back over to her beaming husband with only the smallest tinge of regret.

During their last dance, Peggy smiled up at him, and looked significantly at Howard, who was talking to the Vice President and the director of the CIA and laughing.

“Told you so.” She said, grinning wide and her eyes sparkled with mischief.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re always right, Peggy, how could I have ever doubted you, etcetera, etcetera.”

She laughed out loud at that.

Tensions with the Soviets had ramped up quickly and both Howard and Steve had been called into DC permanently, Howard for counter nuclear defense tactics, and Steve as a military consultant and to train agents. He asked Peggy repeatedly if she needed him in the field, but she told him over and over; “You’re Captain America, darling; the world knows your face far too well for you to be a covert operative.”

President Eisenhower liked Steve, had liked Steve since they met during the Battle of the Bulge, and liked him even more when he’d insisted joining ground troops on Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands. It was thanks to him that Steve had not only been field-promoted to Major, but also allowed Steve to continue dictate his own terms of employment and deployment with the US army.

“You can go wherever you want to go, Rogers. You’re a hell of a soldier, and you can punch your way into a Panzer tank with your bare hands. You’re an invaluable asset to your country.”

It was also because of Eisenhower that Steve was protected when the McCarthyists came and tried to interrogate both he and Howard as potential communist sympathizers. For Howard, the inquiry made sense, as all the New York intelligentsia who took an interest in art and parties were put in the suspicious spotlight. Steve, on the other hand, was a decorated war hero, and thus the investigation made no sense, until one of the agents mentioned that Steve’s “close relationships with men, namely the deceased Sergeant Barnes and now Howard Stark, labelled him as a potential homosexual and thus enemy of the American way.”

Steve had stormed back to the enormous townhouse Howard lived in and almost kicked the door off the hinges.

When he told Howard about the accusations, Howard had burst out laughing.

“They think we’re fucking? Ha! Christ on sale, these idiots don’t quit, do they? Calling Captain America a queer, what will they think of next?”

Steve, who had been flying on a churning sea of rage and terror, had gone very still.

“And what if he was?” He’d said through his teeth.

Howard’s grinning face had very quickly faded into one of shocked realization, and he’d let out a long breath.

He scrubbed his hands through his hair, eyes darting around unfocused like a man trying desperately to think. He walked a few very fast small circles, hands gesticulating.

“Ah, shit.” He said, then smacked the back of his hand onto the other palm, “Okay. _I_ am going to find a girl and have a big public fling. That’ll get them off my trail. _You,_ we need to find you a gal too. A pretty one who’ll hang off your arm and give you big ol’ moon eyes. An actress. A _good_ one. And, I dunno. I’ll have the Times re-release a photo of you and Peggy or something.”

Steve had just stared at him.

He hadn’t expected that. He’d expected revulsion, anger, betrayal.

Not resourceful acceptance and initiative.

“But, uh. You um.” Howard gave him a small sideways look, “You and Barnes, were…uh?”

“No!” Steve yelled, so suddenly and forcefully that Howard blanched, “No. Never. We never. Not _once,_ Howard. But, I still...” His voice faded.

Steve had reached into the secret interior pocket of his coat and withdrawn the drawing, staring at the folded paper, before proffering it wordlessly.

Howard had blinked in confusion, but taken the picture and opened it, eyes raking over the sketch.

And just like Peggy, Steve watched as understanding slowly dawned on Howard’s face.

“Oh.” Howard said, staring at the picture. He looked up at Steve, and then back down, before a sudden profound sadness crept over his normally amiable features. He folded up the picture carefully, and handed it back to Steve, making direct eye contact with him as he did so. “I’m sorry, Steve. I’m… I can’t imagine. I wish I’d known earlier, I’d…God. I’m sorry.” He put his hands on both of Steve’s shoulders, “Listen, we won’t find you a girl, alright? We’ll think of something else. I’ll get someone to put a call in to your pal Dwight, hmm? He hates McCarthy, he’ll deal with this.”

Steve had been speechless, so he just wrapped up the smaller man in a hug, hoping to show at least a fraction of his gratitude.

Sure enough, the next day, a note came into Steve’s office that the investigations into his political allegiances had been called off, and he was free to serve the country as he had been.

After that, Howard had been… not _kinder,_ exactly, but…more forgiving. More respectful of Steve’s privacy. He didn’t ask lewd leading questions anymore, or suggestively waggle his eyebrows and ask about Steve’s love life. He just became more steadfast, and a more staunch supporter of Steve and his ideas.

When Peggy had her first baby in ‘58, Steve had come to visit as soon as she was out of the hospital. She’d been lying in her bed on her side, head propped up on her hand, smiling a small smile at the wriggling baby girl on the coverlet beside her, gurgling and kicking her tiny legs.

Brian, who’d shown Steve into the house and up to their room, was beaming like a man under an incantation, all blank awe and smitten love.

“I’ll just be downstairs if you need me.” He said, hand patting Steve gently on the shoulder before withdrawing.

Steve had walked over to the bedside and stared down, eyebrows almost in his hair.

“Well, hello there.” Peggy said quietly, smiling up at him.

Steve let his knees buckle and he sat ungracefully on the carpet, staring with wide eyes at the miniscule creature right in front of him.

“Her name is Amelia, if you’re wondering.” Peggy said, watching him as he stared.

Steve lifted his hand up and carefully, slowly, not trusting all his ridiculous strength and giant hands, touched one of Amelia’s fingers.

Almost immediately, the tiny fist grasped his pinky, and Steve let out a huff of amazed laughter.

“She’s incredible, Peg.” He said, finally looking up at her.

“Mm, she certainly is. And she’s got the lungs of an oxen, let me tell you.”

Steve couldn’t help but grin, wiggling his finger so her little arm bounced a little, “Oh, is that so? A loud one, are you?”

Little Amelia blinked her milky unfocused blue eyes at him and made a loud burbling noise.

Both Steve and Peggy laughed at that, voices hushed.

They stared at her for quite some time, soaking in the silence of the room. It was profoundly peaceful, but Steve felt the shadows inside the walls creep to him where he sat, and echo inside his head like the tolling of a bell.

Looking at the baby, it made Steve wonder what his life might have been like, if he’d chosen it. What kind of father he’d have made. Would his children have been born healthy, inhumanly strong and tough? Or would they have been stunted, weak and chronically ill as he had been?

Would he be able to have children at all?

But every question was conjecture. That domestic scene of bliss in front of him, that warmth on the bed, was something that wasn’t for him.

He’d been made, been purpose-built to fight in wars. To kill, to lead, to conquer. And he used that power to the best of his ability to keep others, who had families like this one, alive and whole. He chose to fight so they didn’t have to, to take bullets so they didn’t take them, to use his bare hands in places they would have to use weapons.

If he couldn’t have this image in front of him for himself, he could protect it and what it meant.

“I can hear you thinking over there.” Peggy said, her own fingers tracing Amelia’s round silky cheeks.

Steve hesitated, hesitant to mar this idyllic scene with his own woes.

“There isn’t anything like this for me in the cards. I’m realizing it more and more.” Steve replied, his voice just barely above a whisper.

“That isn’t true, Steve. You could meet someone tomorrow, someone who could very well be the love of your life.”

Her words should have been reassuring, but all it felt like was as if someone had plunged a serrated blade into his chest and twisted.

“I know who the love of my life is, Peggy.” He whispered, the words like a wound.

Peggy just looked at him, her expression amazed.

“Even after all this time?”

“It doesn’t fade and it doesn’t change.” Steve wiped a thumb brusquely under one traitorous eye, “He’s a part of me, Pegs. Whether I like it or not. And if this is the only way I can keep him with me, then I will.”

“Oh, _Steve_.” She said, grasping his hand and pressing a kiss to it with trembling lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry it all happened this way.”

“Not all of it.” Steve said, and sniffed hard, looking down at the obliviously squirming Amelia, “You’re so happy, Peggy. And here _she_ is. I can’t regret any of this.”

Peggy just gave a wet sniff and a tear ran down her cheek.

“I’m not sure what on Earth we all did to deserve you, Steve Rogers, but I’m thankful for it nonetheless.”

“Well, I think declaring war on Germany probably started the _ball rolling_.” Steve said, and smiled when she gave him a withering, unamused glare, wiping tears from her eyes.

From out in the hallway, there had been an awkward cough.

“Er… can I come in yet, or are we all still crying?”

Before he’d left to Vietnam, before JFK was shot, Steve had… tried to find companionship.

He’d _wanted_ someone, someone he could touch and feel against him, someone to breathe next to and to feel the heat of their living flesh.

There were places in New York he knew of, places that existed even when he lived there in the thirties and forties. Places men could go to meet… other men.

Even years after he’d finally accepted that this was something he did indeed want, his mind shrank from the idea for so long, the bone-deep shame and fear too powerful to override.

But eventually, the emptiness got too great, and he succumbed.

He’d dressed nice- not _flashy,_ not attention seeking, but put together. He stood near the back of a crowded bar, wide-eyed and incredibly sober, not to mention overwhelmed and so terribly naïve.

Men did come up to him, all different types, big and small, flamboyant and not. They would offer to buy him drinks, but Steve felt bad wasting their money and always ordered a soda.

He left after about an hour, too nervous to try dance or speak to anyone beyond pleasantries, and went straight to Howard’s.

Howard, who was sitting in his workshop squinting at blueprints, peered up at Steve over his glasses when he came over, sat down heavily on a stool and put his head down on the workshop bench.

“Hard night?” Howard asked.

“I went to a bar.”

“Oh. Well. Kind of a waste, I guess, but good for you.”

“A…a _queer_ bar.”

Howard was silent for a moment, and Steve looked up at him, expecting to see discomfort. Instead, Howard waved a hand, indicating that Steve continue his story.

“And? Did you strike out, or hit a home run?”

Steve groaned and plonked his head back down, putting his arms over his head.

“I could barely talk to anyone. They were all nice to me. Understanding. I think they could all tell I had no clue what I was doing there.”

Howard snorted. “Oh no, _they_ knew what you were doing there. But they also knew you had no idea what _you_ were doing. You gotta loosen up, Stevie boy, or they’re gonna start thinkin’ you’re a cop.”

“Oh Jesus. I hadn’t thought of that. Do I really…look like a cop?” Steve lifted his head and stared at Howard, horrified.

“Uh. No You know what, you actually look far too square to be an undercover cop. Any cop that looks like you is either suffering from a head injury, or so terrible at their job they might actually be good. And you’re not either of those. So we gotta get you some new duds if you’re gonna find a man to… you know. Plow your field.”

“ _Howard_.” Steve said, grimacing and pressing his palms into his eyes.

“Grind your corn? Sew your wheat. Whatever the vernacular is. I’ll have some clothes sent over in the morning. No, _not mine_ ,” he said, waving his hands when he saw Steve open his mouth, “I know none of my clothes will fit you, _Goliath._ Jarvis already has your measurements, he’ll come with the car in the morning.”

And so, Steve went back to the bar two nights later, in the clothes picked out for him by Howard, looking every bit like a stand in for Marlon Brando in _Streetcar,_ which Steve thought was probably a conscious choice. Howard even arrived before Steve left to ensure his criteria was met.

“If only Erskine could have seen this. Lord, the rest of the male species is doomed.”

Steve worried than if he crossed his arms, the seams on the sleeves would pop.

Jarvis combed his hair for him, which was humiliating, but Howard looked so earnest Steve couldn’t bring himself to refuse.

When he arrived, he immediately felt out of place. Not only because not one other person there was dressed like he was, but also he was the only one not wearing bright colours. Between that and his size, he stuck out like a sore thumb.

Steve hid at the back bar again, glowering at nothing in particular.

He was so distracted by thinking of the tirade he was going to go on, in fact, he didn’t notice a man come up beside him and mention, with no foreplay, “I don’t know who dressed you, my dear, but to whom can I send a card?”

Steve looked up and… just sort of stared.

The man was pretty. Not pretty like Bucky- but then who was? He had an incredibly fine face, a darling aquiline nose and pert rosebud lips so lovely Steve immediately wondered if he could draw them.

He wore a black turtleneck and a perfectly fitted blue blazer, accentuating his slim frame, and his dark hair was coiffed just as perfectly as James Dean.

“Well? Cat got your tongue?” the man said, and his blue eyes glittering in the low bar lighting.

Steve coughed to clear his throat.

“No! Uh. Well. Maybe a bit.” Steve grimaced at himself.

“So? Who was it who decided to pour you into this shirt? I give them an A for effort, but a C minus for style, and frankly a D for tact.” The man was so at ease with himself it made Steve breathless.

“He. Um. Well. I think he thought he was being funny. And I think he watches too many movies.”

“Hm. Well, I’m as big a Brando fan as the next fella but tell him to just slather you in butter next time and slide you in the door, it’ll save him the trouble.”

Steve couldn’t stop himself from bursting out laughing.

“Can… can I buy you a drink?” Steve said, amazed his mouth managed to form the words without swallowing his own tongue.

“You certainly may,” The man said, and stuck out a hand for Steve to shake, “I’m Martin.”

“Steve.” Steve said, and swore internally at forgetting to use a pseudonym.

Martin must have seen it anyway, because he smirked. “If you forgot to invent a name for the evening, you can relax. Your secret is safe with me.”

Steve and Martin spoke for hours.

It was easy and carefree, and Steve felt himself relaxing in a way he hadn’t in…years.

The only hiccup occurred when Steve asked Martin about his age.

“Ancient. Thirty in two months, damn you for reminding me.” He took a big sip of his cocktail, “And you?”

Steve almost said the real number.

He was _forty two_. Forty two goddamn years old. He didn’t look it whatsoever, but god did he feel every second of it these days.

“Twenty nine. As well.” Steve said, hoping his sudden panic hadn’t been seen.

“Ugh, lord. Well, we can be ancient together.” Martin put a hand on Steve’s arm.

As the night wore on, Steve realized that Martin wanted to come home with him. He could feel it in every motion he made, every brush of his fingers, every time his eyes lingered on Steve’s chest and biceps.

He found himself looking at the man, and his brain seemed to like the darkness of his hair, the shape of his jaw, the pale ocean grey of his eyes.

They were not unlike Bucky’s flame-bright eyes.

“Can I kiss you?” Steve blurted.

Martin smirked. “The day I say no to a man like you kissing me is the day I leap in the river.”

So Steve kissed him.

It was… nice. Warm. Soft. It tasted like whiskey, which was what Martin was drinking.

Martin brought a hand up and slid it up Steve’s chest, over one pectoral and then to the soft skin at the side of his neck, cupping it carefully.

He pulled away an inch or two, and a sly smile crept onto his face.

“Am I the first man you’ve ever kissed, Steve?”

Steve just let himself look from Martin’s lips to his eyes. From this close, he even looked a bit like Bucky.

“Maybe.” Steve replied, running his tongue over his teeth.

Martin chuckled quietly.

“Gosh, what am I to do with _you_.”

Steve saw Martin eleven times after that.

It was the same routine every time. He came over to Steve’s apartment, they had a drink, they fucked enthusiastically and athletically, and then Martin left, blowing a kiss to Steve where he lay sprawled naked and spent across the bed.

Steve learned a lot from Martin, both about himself and his body.

But every time after, he would think of the folded portrait of Bucky hidden in his wardrobe, and couldn’t help the tears of anguish if he tried, leaking into the pillow below his head.

He felt like he’d betrayed something he’d never had.

The evening of their eleventh liaison, it started as business as usual.

Steve was pressed along Martin’s back, both their skin slicked with sweat, Steve’s cock buried deep inside him.

Beneath him, Martin was shuddering in oversensitivity, having willfully endured the onslaught of a supersoldier’s sex drive, gasping wetly into the pillows and arching his back into each thrust.

Steve groaned hugely as he came for a second time inside him, mouth open against the back of Martin’s neck, panting and quivering.

“ _Jesus_.” Martin said, his voice hoarse and breathy.

Steve hummed and mouthed at his neck, his breathing puffing hotly over wet skin. He shifted backwards, his cock slipping heavily from the hot clutch of his body, semen following as Martin groaned at the sensation. Their fucking was always like this- rough, claiming, but impersonal.

Steve pressed small kisses to Martin’s shoulder blades as his hand fumbled for the cloth on the side table, gently cleaning away the remnants of himself from between his legs.

After, he flopped heavily onto his back beside Martin, one arm thrown over his head, eyes closed.

They lay there, side by side, soaking in the night and the aura between them.

It was almost ten minutes later, that Martin said something.

“Can I… Can I say something to you, Steve?”

Steve’s eyes opened, and he looked over to see Martin watching him closely. It wasn’t with the serene post-coital expression Steve had expected, but rather one that was… closed off. Remote. Unsure.

“Of course. Anything.”

Martin drew a deep breath and sat up, arms around his knees. He looked over his shoulder at Steve, jaw set.

"Are you unhappy? Not with _me_ , with… with your life. With what you have?"

Steve felt himself start to tense. He felt suddenly like an animal caught in a spotlight.

"W….why? Why, what's the matter?" Steve didn't know why he played dumb, but he did.

Martin rubbed the back of his neck and then his forehead. He took a deep breath, as if preparing for some unseen impending injury.

“I started wondering what it was. What this strange feeling of _foreboding_ was that I had when I was with you. I thought maybe it was because of this… this whole _Captain America_ thing, and you were afraid of being caught out or something but… I…”

Martin ran a hand through his sweaty hair, pushing it off his sweaty forehead.

“I’ve figured it out. It took me some time, but I did. Your man died, didn’t he? You loved him, and he’s gone, and your heart went with him.”

Steve’s eyes just slid closed, the shot fired straight into his soul. Every rush of shame he’d ever felt came surging over him, swallowing him up and devouring him whole.

“I thought so.” Martin sniffed hard, and Steve opened his eyes again to see a disappointed pinch on Martin’s lovely face, and his cheeks were damp.

“I’m afraid, Steve, that I’ve come to care for you. A bit too much, I think. And I can tell just by looking at your face right now that you have nothing left to give me in return. You’ve spent it all on him, even though he’ll never get to see it.”

Steve took a long, shuddering breath in and let it out.

“Yes.” He said, his voice a dry rasp.

Martin nodded sharply, as if affirming his own suspicion. “Well then there isn’t much for us to discuss, is there? I value my own happiness.”

He left.

There had been no one else since Martin.

And then John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and Johnson sent ground troops to Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson asked Steve in late ‘64 if he would take up the mantle of Captain America again, travel across the country and act as a propaganda figurehead of the American military.

“The American people trust you, son. You led them out of a war, and they’ll believe in you to lead them through this one too. I need you on the homefront, keeping up the side. Convince them we have their best interests in mind”

Steve, who’d been in dress blues, standing in the Oval office, facing the fourth President of his career, had just saluted and stood at attention.

“No, sir. I’ll be going in to command and train as I did in Korea. I’m a super soldier, sir; I was made to fight wars, not to sell them. It was a waste in 1944 and it’s a waste now.”

Silence fell.

Johnson had just stared at Steve, his pouchy face unable to register to outright refusal.

“You...I’m the Commander in Chief, son, and I gave you a direct order.” He leaned forward, stabbing a finger into the leather top of his massive desk.

Steve reached into his pocket and pulled out a crisp piece of paper, which he unfolded and placed in front of the President.

“This is an official letter of special dispensation for meritorious service to the US Armed Forces, drafted originally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, countersigned by General Dwight Eisenhower and later, General Douglas MacArthur, which entitles me to assist the United States army as I see fit, including but not limited to choosing to be deployed permanently in a combat zone, to stay or go at my discretion. This letter was later ratified by President Harry Truman and President Eisenhower, who had it approved the Supreme Court and later countersigned by the UN...that’s this stamp here…” Steve pointed to the stamp, smile bland and beatific, and then withdrew the letter and carefully refolded it and tucked it back in his jacket pocket.

“This letter has been respected by every President and military General since VE Day. And if you insist on being in Vietnam, then I insist on being there. So thank you for the offer, sir, but I will be declining it.” Steve saluted again to Johnson’s stunned face, and then turned to leave.

And then turned back.

“Oh. And don’t call me son. I’m ten years younger than you, not forty.”

And he walked out of the Oval office.

He was on a plane to Saigon three days later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Played fast and loose with American history a bit here, but that's okay... I am Canadian, after all.


	3. Ten Thousand Miles in the Mouth of a Graveyard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The pain and euphoria in the finding of once lost things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has read so far, and continues to do so :)

Ⅵ

A quiet groan on the other side of the stained hospital curtain makes Steve snap back into full consciousness, eyes blinking in the half light of the shadowed MASH wing he’s been sequestered in.

From the tiny window right against the ceiling, he can see angled Eastern light. It must be morning.

He’d been...asleep? Unconscious? Both? It was hard to say.

Again, he hears the rustle of the rough wool blankets and pained breathing, only a few feet from him.

Steve looks down at his chest, where he still has Bucky’s portrait pressed to his chest with his restrained right hand. He takes it with his left and carefully tucks it back under his pillow, before gingerly sitting up. The saline bags feeding him fluids and electrolytes are drained down, so he carefully pulls out the IV needle from his hand.

He feels… marginally better. All the aches and pains from overexertion have mostly faded, and he can see when he looks at his hands that the superficial burns are almost entirely healed.

His right shoulder, however, and chest and throat and upper arm, still throb and ache as fresh as they had.

He closes his eyes and tries to quell the rising panic.

The serum isn’t healing them.

He’d been shot in the gut in France, and was back to normal three days later. He’d had contusions down to the bone, multiple inches deep, that healed in 36 hours. Big broken bones healed in at most four days. He had improperly cleaned wounds that should have festered into massive infections and septicemia, heal themselves cleanly in under a week without any antibiotics.

But these massive burns, where he’s certain now, if he remembers hard enough, he was splashed with actual tongues of liquid napalm, aren’t healing.

Even Dr. Erskine hadn’t figured on the horror that was napalm.

Steve had seen it used in Japan in Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa in ‘45, and again in Korea. He hadn’t argued against it at the time, as it's effectiveness was irrefutable.

But he’d seen what it did to the jungles. To the houses, to the soldiers it was sprayed on...to the civilians mistakenly caught in the crossfire.

Or, as was often the case in, civilians caught with no mistakes at all.

Steve now, looking down at his arm as well as he could, knowing the burns he’s seen hideously disfiguring not only soldiers, but children and women and the elderly, decides that Napalm may be the most evil substance ever to be devised by mankind.

There’s a wheezing whimper from the next bed, louder this time.

Steve takes a few deep breaths and gets slowly, gingerly, to his feet.

He’s only in his plain white boxer shorts, army issue, which are stained with blood and soot and sweat. But he sees, in a pile at the end of his bed, is clean clothing.

First thing’s first; he takes some fresh underwear from the tidy pile, which includes the ubiquitous green t-shirt and trousers, at the end of his bed.

He removes the bandages from his left arm, his wrist and hand, his thigh and around his middle, the gauze falling away to reveal pink new skin, untouched by soot or grime.

He throws out the filthy pair of underwear and pulls on the new clean ones, negotiating awkwardly with only one functional arm.

The pants and shirt may have to wait- his right arm is wrapped with big loose loops of gauze, but even trying to move his shoulder at all feels as if his skin is being torn off in huge screaming patches.

Even his dog tags had been removed, as the chain rested on the burn on the side of his neck.

He hears the ragged breathing again, and nears the curtain, listening carefully.

Slowly, so as not to alert anyone in the next room, he peers through a gap.

The room is similar in size to Steve’s, except it isn’t a corner, and so only has a concrete wall at the head of the bed and past the foot, the remaining two walls made of curtains.

There’s a man lying on the bed, and he’s been so badly...beaten?... about the face, it’s almost impossible for Steve not to stare in horror, unable to look away.

He slips through the gap in the curtains, approaching the bed. The man is making tiny whimpers, and Steve sees his IV bag, presumably with painkillers in it, has run dry.

The man’s nose has been collapsed by something, likely blunt force by the look of it. There are contusions Steve knows to be caused when someone is beaten by a metal pipe or similar, and the swelling is so much that his face hardly registers as one. His lips are sliced to ribbons, and Steve can see most of his teeth are broken. There’s no burns suggesting rocket fire or grenade, and the rest of his body seems pretty much intact.

“What the hell happened to you?” Steve mutters, picking up the clipboard attached to the foot of his bed.

He blinks.

Much of the man’s information is blacked out, in thick black smudges of marker.

His name, his number, his rank, his platoon, even his CO, is redacted.

The only thing readable is the date of his admission ( four days ago) and brief notes by the nurses as to his care regimen.

Steve glances up and sees the man doesn’t even have dog tags, nor are they set aside on the little table like Steve’s are.

“Or, more importantly, _who_ the hell are you?” Steve says, putting the clipboard back.

Steve nears the man’s head again, looking down at him.

It’s impossible to say if Steve recognizes him- even with his near perfect memory, there’s no knowing what the man normally looked like.

Steve’s head snaps up when he hears the scrape of metal curtain rings, and he slowly stands more upright, shoulders back when a man enters.

The man is, first and most noticeably, strikingly handsome. His sandy hair falls just so, his blue eyes bright and alert, his jaw square and masculine.

But also immediately apparent, is that the man clearly is very much in charge.

He wears no insignias or bars, only the plain t-shirt and trousers everyone else wears. There’s nothing to denote his rank, and yet everything about him screams _boss_.

“Ah, I was just coming to check on you.” the man says, and his smile is genuine, shows absolutely nothing else underneath it, and Steve immediately doesn’t trust the man. He can’t say why, but something in the back of his brain twitches violently.

“Sir.” Steve says. “I take it you’re Colonel Pierce?” His eyes dart over the man’s face and he absorbs little details that raise tiny alarms.

He has a 5’oclock shadow, something no officer would _ever_ normally have. His hair is longer than regulation by quite a bit, closer to the length men had it in the Second World War, except not combed back and smoothed with Dap or a similar product.

Pierce approaches around the hospital bed, smile big and open.

“I am. Colonel Alexander Pierce, at your service.”

Steve says nothing, just watches the man in front of him.

“How are you feeling, Captain- ah, _Major_ , sorry, force of habit.”

Steve doesn’t look away from his face. He’s gone still, a habit left over from sitting in trenches and foxholes waiting for an attack to start.

“Well enough, all things considered.” Steve says.

Pierce gives Steve’s exposed body a long once over, his gaze lingering on the places still covered by the bandage.

“I noticed that big burn isn’t healing like the others, hmm?”

Steve says nothing in response, and the tone in the question suggests Pierce hadn’t expected one.

Pierce just smiles, untroubled, and then looks down at the man in the bed, as unperturbed as if he were observing a rose garden or a dog.

Steve looks down as well, his eyes twitching from there and back again to the colonel’s face.

“What happened to him?” Steve asks. He knows his voice is flat and betrays his distrust, but he’s too sore and mentally exhausted to bother caring.

Pierce smiles, so sweetly that butter would clearly not melt on his tongue.

“Small accident. Wrong place at the wrong time. He’ll be sent home in a week or to, not to worry.”

“And his chart?” Steve says, glancing down at the blacked out clipboard and back up again.

Pierce just raises his eyebrows, a picture of innocence.

“Confidentiality is of utmost importance in this warzone, Major. As I’m sure you’re aware, our forces are vulnerable all the time to sabotage and information selling.”

Steve just watches the colonel.

Steve finally takes a breath and says, slowly and carefully, “You know, you never did tell me what regiment you were with.”

Pierce just keeps smiling.

“Not important. What _is_ important, Major Rogers, is that instead of asking questions and getting too worried about everything, we get you back into bed and you get some rest, hmm? If that special super juice you’ve got is going to have a chance at healing that Nape burn, you’ll need to have your strength up.” Pierce pulls back the curtain to Steve’s room, holding it open in invitation.

Steve knows he’s cornered. He knows he’s outranked and outgunned, and he’s too weak and in pain to fight back if it came to it.

He also knows he hadn’t mentioned any napalm to anyone.

And while sure, the colonel could have inferred from context, or crafted a likely scenario… Steve’s hindbrain is prickling with suspicion.

He is acutely aware of where Pierce is in relation to his own body, angling himself so his back is never to him as he slips back into his room.

Pierce follows him in, and gestures mildly at the pile of clean clothes.The clothes which are not supplemented with boots, something Steve realizes as deliberate.

“I had these brought for you. Change into them when you feel able, there’s no rush. You’re safe in here, Major.”

The insinuation being, Steve’s brain supplies, that he _isn’t_ safe outside.

“Thank you, Colonel.” Steve just stands by his bed, waiting for Pierce to leave.

Pierce’s eyes visibly flit over the substantial breadth of Steve’s shoulders, and he smiles slightly larger.

“You really are as magnificent as they say.” his voice is slightly softer, and his head tips to an angle, “The greatest scientific achievement of the modern age. A real shame, really.”

He leaves just as suddenly and inexplicably as he came, and Steve clenches his jaw.

  
Steve gets back into bed, and as he stares at the ceiling, he reflects on the word ‘frag.’

‘Fragging’ was something that was occurring with increasing regularity in Vietnam.

Officers arrived in country, eager to make a name for themselves, and insisted on dangerous missions that risked not only their own lives, but also the lives of the increasingly unwilling draftees under them. The new officers wanted a high Kill/Death Ratio at any cost.

And so, in response, that officer would find themselves on the receiving end of an M26 fragmentation grenade.

It would look like a casualty of combat, or a terrible accident.

But it was anything but.

And as the war dragged on, longer and longer, the more often the incidents occurred.

Being fragged wasn’t something Steve had ever worried about. He was, in fact, entirely unpreoccupied with his platoon’s KDR, and focused on keeping as many of them whole and alive as possible. It was because of this that no soldier in their right mind would ever want to remove him as their commanding officer- he wanted the same things they did.

But then the question arises in Steve’s head.

What happens when an officer looks into the ranks below, and sees the face of a man who does not believe in their leader?

What happens when that officer is an entire war effort, an entire _country_ , and that soldier who’s gone off message is the nation’s greatest icon of military might?

Steve knows his politics made him inconvenient, and his position as Captain America makes him dangerous.

And he knows what happens to inconveniently dangerous people in a warzone.

Some time later, after staring at the ceiling, Steve again hears the sound of someone enter the little room next to his.

It turns out, in fact, to be two someones.

“I don’t see why you gotta be here. I don’t need to be babysat, I know my job.”

It’s the charming Southern twang of Nurse Roberts, sounding vaguely annoyed.

“I’m here to make sure he doesn’t speak.” a man’s voice, oddly hoarse and abrupt.

“He ain’t speakin’ to _nobody;_ the poor boy’s barely got any mouth left for heaven’s sake.”

There’s the quiet rustling of efficient activity, and Steve makes a fast decision.

He gets out of bed and jumps into his pants,zipping them and buttoning them, which is difficult considering he can’t move his elbow or shoulder.

Wincing, he works his hand through the sleeve of the t-shirt, the easy part, and then bites his lip to stop himself from screaming as he pulls it up over the heavy bandage on his upper arm and shoulder.

He pops his head through the collar, and then slowly works his good arm into it’s sleeve, breaking immediately into a cold sweat when the tension on the fabric pulls taught over the burns.

He pulls the sketch out from under his pillow and stores it in a zippered pocket of the pants, and then drags his dog tags back on over his head.

He’s dressed, or as well as he can be without shoes or socks.

Steve wipes sweat off his brow and whips back the separating curtain, yet again making Nurse Roberts jump in the middle of administering morphine to the beaten man.

“Jesus! Capt, uh, _Major_! What in the hell do you think you’re doing, pardon my French?” she snaps, hands on her hips.

The man standing just beside her is dressed like every other soldier off duty, in unmarked green t-shirt and pants. No bars denote his rank.

He has a massive, non-army issue pistol on his one hip, what looks like a massive taser on the other, and what appears to be the deep blue and purple of a massive bruise, in the shape of a handprint, on the front of his throat.

“Did you need something, Major?” the man says. His voice is dry and raspy, as if suffering from damage to his voice box. That explains the handprint.

“Uh, well.” Steve looks between the two of them, and then decides on pulling out his best Captain America smile, “Just getting lonely all by myself over here is all.”

Nurse Roberts immediately melts, her smile growing enormous and her cheeks bright pink.

“Well I don’t blame you, stored off in a dark corner like you are!”

Steve beams back a her.

The man beside her is unaffected.

He just glares, dark eyes flat and unreachable like a shark. He has the eyes of a career soldier.

“Return to your bed, Major. Colonel Pierce has ordered you to remain here.”

Steve just smiles at him, his face nothing but innocent.

Howard calls it his “beautiful, harmless idiot” face, and it’s gotten them out of a scrape more than once.

“Well, I’m sorry to say, soldier, but I haven’t been brought any food yet, and I’m about to eat my own pillow if I don’t get to the mess in the near future.”

The man bristles, but Nurse Roberts just waves her hand at him.

“Of _course_ you’re hungry. Heck, I bet you’re half starved, considering the size of you! Henderson can bring you to the mess, leave me to finish up here. Can’t you, Henderson?”

Henderson just glowers, first at Steve and then at her.

“My _orders_ are to-” he starts.

“Your _orders_ are to make sure this here unconscious and sedated man doesn’t say anything to me about whatever horrible thing ya’ll let happen to him, which is idiotic and frankly insulting. Take the Major, _who outranks you,_ to the mess for something to eat before I tell Head Nurse Major Comley about all this fuss.”

Steve doesn’t know who Major Comley is, but considering the slight blanche on Henderson’s face, she must be formidable indeed.

“I just need something to eat, son. Nothing too complicated.” Steve gives him another winning smile.

Henderson scowls deeper but relents, ducking out of the room.

Steve follows, but not before winking at Nurse Roberts and making her smile a gigantic smile right back.

“Thanks, doll.” he says. He thinks Bucky would probably be proud.

The ward he was being kept in is apparently a basement, and Steve and the redacted man with no face are the only two down here.

He follows Henderson up a set of rusted stairs, into what appears to be a dry goods and materiale storage building.

Outside, in the bright mid morning light, the camp appears to be like any other MASH, with tents, large and small, Jeeps, nurses and soldiers and doctors walking about with purpose.

A few wounded men sit in a circle outside a tent and are smoking and playing cards.

The nearby mess is easily located by following the smell, and the clatter of utensils on aluminum trays. Henderson waves Steve in, glancing around in a hunted fashion.

Likely looking for Pierce, if Steve isn’t mistaken.

“As ease, soldier.” Steve says as he goes by, and Henderson glares at him.

Steve would be lying if he said he wasn’t hungry, so he gets a tray and gets in the queue with the others, behind a few surgeons and nurses still in their scrubs. They are all having a conversation, and so ignore him as he goes along, getting heaps of pseudo-recognisable food plopped into his sectioned tray.

“Er. Can I get… two trays?” Steve says, looking down at it.

He grew up in the depression, so he’ll eat anything even remotely foodlike, but the portions are a bit on the meagre side.

The cook serving it opens his mouth to snap a reply, but then seems to really register Steve’s face and he goes pale.

“Yessir, Captain America, sir.” he says. He looks about 19.

Steve finds a table, relatively unoccupied, and plops himself down.

And proceeds to eat very, very slowly.

After about 20 minutes, he can see Henderson getting annoyed. He keeps checking his watch, glancing through the curtain, sighing to himself.

“If you have duties to attend to, soldier, don’t let me detain you.” Steve says, very slowly lifting a small spoonful of rehydrated mashed potato into his mouth. It tastes like sawdust.

Henderson rubs sweat off his face and makes an annoyed growl in his throat.

“Look, just, _stay here_ , alright? When you’re done, just sit and wait for me to come get you. And _don’t move_.”

Steve has to suppress the smirk fighting it’s way onto his lips.

“Of course. Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Steve waits until Henderson is out the flap, watches as his back disappears across the muddy road, and then he’s up in a flash, around the counter and out the back of the kitchen, scaring the living daylights out of the meal prep workers.

Steve follows the edge of the tent, back against the canvas, peering around until he sees Henderson again, walking quickly across the camp.

Feigning nonchalance, Steve walks around the tent, passing a few nurses who stare at him and giggle when he gives them a smile, and then he darts behind another tent, flanking Henderson by running behind the officer’s shower tent.

Steve follows him in this manner for almost a half click, darting around tents and piles of crates, and avoiding other people.

Henderson, by the look of it, finally is approaching an old concrete building on the very edge of the camp, ramshackle and added onto with tents and awnings. Unlike the other tents, it has no sign denoting its purpose, and it’s set back from the other tents by a large distance, surrounded on three sides by the dense jungle.

And, as Henderson approaches, Pierce leaves one of the attached tents, walking in the opposite direction.

“ _Jackpot._ ” Steve mutters, skirting a small shed to stay hidden.

Pierce calls out to Henderson, who keeps walking but shouts something back. Pierce walks backwards a few steps to reply, and then continues on his way.

Steve waits until Henderson ducks into the flap of an attached tent, and then he runs across the grass field, slinking around the backside of one of the long canvas walls on the opposite side of where Henderson disappeared.

It’s silent on this side of the camp, and the jungle is thick and shaded. Steve gathers himself in the partial darkness, willing the screaming pain radiating from his right shoulder, arm, back and chest to fade.

It doesn’t.

He approaches the back of the building, which is covered in heavy vines and has no door or windows. The roof is shingled by metal slats, many of which are rusting.

Steve walks carefully along the wall, wiping sweat off his face, and trying to swish away flies that come to harass him. The ground is littered with old vegetation, which crunches and crumbles beneath his bare feet.

 _Bare feet,_ he thinks, _fuck you, Pierce_.

He stops to get his bearings, his right arm clamped to his side to avoid moving it too much. The jungle is a noisome green fog, flickering and breathing around him. He can hear the shrill panic of birds, the rustle of feathers, the whistle of crickets and various other insects he has no name for.

And, as he leans on the wall, he can hear trumpets.

Steve’s eyes fly open.

Somewhere beyond the wall he’s leaning on, inside the concrete, is the sound of orchestral jazz trumpets.

Steve blinks, and his brows furrow in confusion.

Someone has a record player, here, in Vietnam.

And they’re playing Glenn Miller’s “Serenade in Blue”, from 1942.

Steve slips along the wall and when he sees the edge in the canvas, he peeks through to make sure the little room beyond is empty before slipping inside.

It appears to be an admin room, with a desk and a few filing cabinets.

There’s several files on a desk, all stamped with regulation US Army stamps. Steve moves a few, and nothing incriminating stands out.

He wants to know what Pierce is doing here, with his unmarked men and his special ward in the basement of a warehouse.

And, if possible, Steve wants to know more about this plot to frag Captain America.

Steve moves through the office, ducking through the next cell of canvas into what appears to be someone’s sleeping area, and then skirts again past an amazingly well appointed shower. It takes a few moments to orient himself, but eventually he spies an old rusted door into the concrete building. He pulls it open, wincing when it squeals on rusted and bent hinges.

It’s dark inside. The door opened into a long hallway, unlit with anything other than a single uncovered bulb dangling from the ceiling. It smells damp, like a root cellar or basement, and it reeks of the uncirculated air of decades enclosed. There’s a few doors here and there, and Steve cans see by the light filtering in around the edges of the ill fitting doors that a few open into the tents on the other side of the building.

Still more are have no doors and are dark beyond, and Steve, as he inches along on the rubble covered ground, can see partially crumbled walls and twisted bits of metal. There are a few broken windows in the attached rooms, and a tree is growing through the floor in one.

Steve follows the music.

This leads him to the very end of the hall, to small room.

The room appears to be a tiny office, with little more than a small rickety table and chair, and a few odd items, such as a bucket, a mop handle, a filthy rag soaked in what seems to Steve to be blood.

On the table, spinning lazily in the heavily shadowed orange light of another single uncovered bulb, is a record player.

Steve walks over to it, staring down at the revolving black disc, the notes of the orchestra sweet and achingly familiar.

It’s an old phonograph type player, with the big conical horn, just like the type he and Bucky’s neighbor Mrs. Caravaggio had in Brooklyn in the 40s. She would roll it into the hall sometimes and play Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller or The Ink Spots, and Bucky would prop the door open with a brick to let the music in.

Oftentimes, the 8 year old twins Harriet and Evelyn would come shyly slinking down the hall, blushing and giggling, wanting Bucky to stand them on his feet and twirl them around to the music. Small though he was, Steve too could swing them around, though not nearly as well or as coordinated, and he always knew the girl he was shakily dancing with was waiting for the second she was allowed her turn with Bucky. Not that Steve blamed them in the least; Bucky was the most handsome man in the neighborhood, nevermind the building.

It takes a full minute of staring, memories rolling over him in continuous excruciating waves, before he becomes aware enough of his surroundings to see that there’s yet another single door in the back of the office.

It’s a heavy door, newer than the others. The hinges are bolted into the concrete, and welded on top of that. The small window above the door handle is papered over on the inside, and screwed onto the door, right at eye level is a massive sign prohibiting entry to any unauthorized personnel.

There are three padlocks above and below the handle, all locked securely.

Steve approaches and puts his ear to the door, and hears nothing beyond it.

He glances back at the hallway he’d come through, and then closes the door behind him before returning to the heavy door. With his strength, the locks are the work of a second; he simply grabs and gives them a sharp downwards tug, popping them open.

He tries the door knob, yanking harder when it too is locked. The deadbolt shrieks a bit, but gives way, and the door opens.

Steve steps into the room beyond, and comes up short immediately.

Like the room before it, there is virtually nothing in the way of furnishings.

Except in this room, sitting on a chair and chained to a massive ring embedded in the floor, is a man.

The man is large- large like Steve, broad across the shoulders and his right arm is corded with hard muscle.

His left arm is made entirely of overlapping articulated plates of gleaming chrome metal, which shifts and ripples in the awkward position he’s been forced into, with his arms tightly chained and locked behind the back of the chair. There’s a red star painted on his metal deltoid, scuffed but visible in the black tank top he’s wearing.

He’s in similar clothes as Steve- green pants, bare feet- except his are considerably dirtier, soaked with sweat and smeared with dirt and rusty old blood. His black shirt is ragged in areas, and Steve sees a hole in the chest, as if he’s been shot, but there’s visible untouched skin underneath it.

The man’s head hangs, chin to chest, his long dark hair falling around his face in a curtain.

He is incredibly, unnaturally still, despite the door to the room he’s being kept in being broken open not seconds earlier.

As Steve takes a few steps closer, he can see the man is in fact breathing relatively quickly, as if anticipating an attack he can’t prepare for.

Steve’s eyes rake over the man, confusion building. Of all the things he’d expected Pierce to be hiding, a heavily chained man with a terrifying cybernetic arm was _not_ one of them.

The man’s chest is heaving, and Steve can hear him dragging in air through his nose.

Slowly, broadcasting his movements, Steve kneels in front of the chair.

The cybernetic arm immediately makes a quiet whine and there’s the clink of chains under tension.

“No, no, I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.”

Steve hold up his hands, palm up, the right one as best as he can without moving his elbow.

The man doesn’t move, just continues to breathe sharply.

His hair obscures most of his face, and he doesn’t try to lift it to see Steve any better.

Steve glances at the metal arm again. It’s a formidable piece of engineering, and he can’t imagine the toll it would take to graft it onto a human skeleton. The false musculature of it seems to mirror that of his flesh arm, but Steve can see by the heft of the chains that it’s by far stronger than a regular arm.

Steve looks back at his regular arm, and then…

The world stops spinning.

The air sucks out of his lungs, the flesh on his bones turns to ice and then lead. A million volts of electricity incandes in his veins and behind his eyes.

His heart explodes in his chest and his hearing becomes nothing but the cavernous echoes of the explosion.

There’s an old scar on the man’s lower right arm, almost in the inside of his elbow. It’s shaped like a ragged X, with one arm pointing at a single, innocent little mole.

It’s something Steve saw every time it was hot enough to roll up shirtsleeves in the summer. He saw it on Friday nights when Bucky was getting ready to go out dancing and ran through the apartment in his undershirt, half shaved and panicking when he couldn't find the comb that was usually in his other hand. He’d seen it up close when Bucky had flopped his arm across Steve’s face in his sleep, nestled together on their narrow single bed because they were too poor to keep the steam on all winter.

At age 9, Bucky had got his arm and sleeve caught in the ragged edge of a chain link fence, running away from an angry policeman after he’d thrown a rotten onion into traffic.

And now, here was the same scar, 43 years after its inopportune, violent birth.

“Bucky.” Steve can’t help himself, can’t stop himself saying it.

The man flinches almost imperceptibly, but his head lifts ever so slightly.

“Look at me.” Steve’s voice is barely a whisper. His pulse is so loud it’s deafening him.

The man in the chair is shaking harder now, but he lifts his head again, and some of his dark, dark hair falls aside.

A tiny sob climbs out of his throat when he sees the shape of the face underneath, and when those giant blue eyes, wide and full of muted panic, meet his, his whole body shudders with simultaneous terrific joy and abject terror.

“Bucky. Bucky, _Jesus, Bucky._ ” Steve can’t stop himself from clasping Bucky’s sweaty cheek in his good hand, staring into the ocean azure eyes he’s been so sure he would never see again before Steve died, and has hoped more than anything he might see in every moment after.

Bucky just stares back, his face not a complete blank, but not one of recognition either.

Horror rises in Steve’s chest, higher and higher, drowning him.

Bucky doesn’t know him.

“Bucky, do you know who I am? Who am I? _Bucky_?” Steve implores, panic rising.

Bucky just stares, lower lip quivering slightly.

And it _is_ him. There’s no one else with this face, with those eyes, even his _smell_ is the same.

“It’s me, Buck. It’s Steve. It’s your Steve.” Steve can’t stop the tears running down his face, can’t stop himself from stroking back through Bucky’s hair, tucking it behind his ear.

Bucky’s gaze is roving all over Steve’s face, his brows furrowing and unfurrowing. He looks disbelieving, as if his eyes are untrustworthy.

“S...Steve?” he says. His voice is raspy and dry from disuse. He sounds so incredibly unsure, but it’s better than nothing at all.

“Yeah.” Steve nods, smiling at the sound of that beautiful voice, tears curving around his twisted lips, “Yeah, Buck. It’s me.”

Bucky is still shaking, and his eyes are still wary and confused, darting everywhere in furtive twitches.

“D...don’t… can’t…” he says, shaking his head a tiny bit, as if trying to clear an errant thought, or find a lost one.

Steve lets out another uncontrolled sob of shock and anguish, and he presses his lips to Bucky’s sweaty forehead, savoring the heat and smell of him.

“How, Bucky?” Steve puts their foreheads together and looks into his eyes, “How are you here?”

Bucky just keeps staring at Steve, confused and so vulnerable.

Steve’s chest can hardly contain the violence inside him, the fear and hope and dismay and joy. He’s shuddering like he’s been frozen in ice and thawed.

“I’ve got you, Buck. I’m here.” Steve says, letting out a long, huge breath he thinks he’s been holding since 1945.

There’s a scratching sound of a record being stopped, and Steve is just too slow, just too compromised and distracted, to not be able to move fast enough.

The shot goes off, and Steve feels it go into his side like a punch, sending him sprawling.

Pierce enters the room, a .44 revolver in his right hand, a file in the other.

“Well now, isn’t this cute.” he says, smirking as he kicks the door closed behind him.

Steve is gawping, the wind knocked out of him from the impact from the bullet, the pain radiating from his shoulder where he fell onto it. He clutches at the immediately bleeding wound, panting through an open mouth.

Pierce walks over to stand beside Bucky, who hasn’t moved, is just staring at Steve on the ground. He’s shivering so hard the chains are jingling.

“ _How?_ ” Steve hisses, dragging himself into a semi-seated position, loathing pouring from his eyes.

“How what?” Pierce says, amused, .44 still unerringly pointed at Steve, “You’ll have to be a touch more specific, Major.”

Steve _seethes_ , breath whistling through his gritted teeth.

Pierce takes a big breath, as if settling into his role.

“You know, the agents always ask about the old swing music. Keeps him calm, I tell them. And it does! But only _I_ know why.” Pierce still has the half smile on his face.

Steve gets his arm under him, and levers himself half up off the ground.

The second shot goes off, and this time goes into his upper chest near his good shoulder, flattening him back onto the ground.

“Stay where you are, or I’ll shoot you somewhere that _will_ kill you.” Pierce says, and his eyes are suddenly hard and sharp like flecks of crushed stone.

He backs up until he’s standing behind Bucky’s chair, and he flips open the folder in his hand. Steve can see that written on the cover is the words ‘July Sundown’.

“And we _know_ what kills you, because we’ve had _him_ to experiment on.” Pierce says, and he taps the folder on the top of Bucky’s head for emphasis.

Steve, from where he’s sprawled on the ground, snarls at him in incoherent, useless rage.

Pierce beings to read from the file, as if dictating a telegram. “As written here, in Dr. Arnim Zola’s own hand, ‘the enhanced Asset prototype is as close a replica of Dr. Erskine’s original formula as is likely to ever exist, and thus we can extrapolate that effects on the prototype are likewise effective against Captain America’.” Pierce gives Steve a raised eyebrow, “Pay attention now, because he’s referring to you.”

Steve looks at Bucky, who is just staring at Steve with his face a picture of incomprehension and fear.

_I’m sorry_ , Steve thinks, staring into those giant blue eyes, _I’m so sorry._

That Hydra base Steve rescued him from. That lab table. Bucky’s hardfaced muteness on everything that happened there… whatever it was they’d done, it had made Bucky survive the fall from the train, only to be picked up by the cold, terrifying embrace of Hydra’s scientists.

“ ‘The Asset can withstand gunshot, laceration and massive contusion to almost all limbs, the exception likely being the total severing of the femoral, iliac or subclavian arteries, resulting in massive exsanguination. Blood loss can be recouped at a rate of almost a litre a day, making other blood loss inconsequential’.”

Steve feels his blood slipping under his hands, sticky and slippery and hot.

“ ‘The Asset can withstand direct trauma to organs and viscera, including pulmonary trauma and some cardiac trauma. Direct piercing or crushing trauma to the heart or it’s structures would likely cause massive internal bleeding and death. In trial in 1952, Asset withstood eighteen direct punctures to torso, and was able to recover to 80% combat functionality within 48 hours.’ Phew, now _that’s_ impressive.” Pierce adds, smirking when Steve struggles on the floor, growling and trying to get up again but slipping on his own accumulating puddle of blood.

“ _Fuck you._ ” Steve snarls, dragging in laborious breaths.

Pierce ignores this. “ It says here ‘The Asset is able to heal from skin lesions with remarkable speed, the exception being burns from temperatures below negative 110 centigrade, or above 600 degrees centigrade.’ Now, _here_ , we get into those Nape burns of your.” Pierce gestures with his pistol, “See, Napalm burns at about 5000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about twenty seven hundred Celcius. So I’m guessing, if the acetylene torch burns they did on _him_ ,” he nods at Bucky, “didn’t heal up all that well, then I’m assuming they won’t heal on you either. So, had those pilots done their _jobs_ and strafed the area like they were _supposed_ to, I wouldn’t have to be cleaning up after them. ” Pierce sighs deeply, as if announcing the passing of an acquaintance.

Steve realizes that he’s going to die here. He’s going to die on the filthy concrete floor, having just found Bucky again, only to have him slip away once more.

He decides that if he has to die here and now, it’ll be looking at Bucky.

“I’m sorry, Buck. I’m so sorry. But you have to fight him.” Steve’s voice is ragged and he can taste blood. Talking is getting harder and harder. “ _Fight him off. You’re stronger than anyone I know; you can fight him._ ”

Bucky is panting now, his mouth a crimson smear, teeth bright white, eyes wide, skin glistening with perspiration. He still stares at Steve.

“Ah, as sweet and heartwarming as all this is, I’m afraid your friend Bucky Barnes doesn’t exist anymore. He’s a tool and a weapon for the greater good. I point him, he shoots.” Pierce closes the folder and tucks it under his arm, then drops a heavy hand on Bucky’s head, fingers digging into Bucky’s dark hair, making it twist at an odd angle. Bucky’s eyes and mouth snap shut, and Steve tries to get up again, a whine of pain and effort seeping from between his teeth.

“ _Steve_.” it’s a quiet, plaintive whimper, and it galvanizes Steve’s resolve.

“You _say he’s just a weapon_.” Steve hisses, propping himself up on his elbows, “But why did you have him chained up like a rabid dog? In a locked room?” Pierce says nothing, and Steve suddenly puts pieces together, pieces he should have found and placed ages ago, “He’s not listening to you, is he? He beat that man in your secret basement infirmary, and he tried to do the same to Henderson, that’s what those bruises on his throat are. You lost control and you’ve got him chained up because you’ve _lost control and you don’t know what to do with him_.”

Anger flashes in Pierce’s eyes, and he opens his mouth to snap a reply, his gun hand coming up with terrifying accuracy.

He only gets out a single syllable before he’s being bodily thrown into the concrete wall.

Bucky is up on his feet, the broken heavy cuffs falling to the floor with a clunk and rattle of chains. He’s staring at Pierce’s limp form where it’s slumped on the floor.

Steve hadn’t even hear him break free.

“Bucky. _Bucky_.” Steve says, and lifts a hand at him.

Bucky whips around, and before Steve can say anything, Bucky is upon him, arms scooping and picking him up with a whir of intricate mechanical noises and hardly a grunt of exertion, setting Steve heavily over one shoulder. Blood follows behind them in a continuous trickle, red droplets trailing like tiny comets.

Bucky kicks through the metal door, and punches his way through another, before suddenly they are outside, under canvas, and then with a ripping noise, are in the jungle, lurching through the moist green haze.

Bucky stops after only a few hundred yards, and kneels, carefully depositing Steve at the trunk of a tree, leaning him back against it.

He stands up, looming over him, fists clenched and his body smeared in Steve’s blood.

He’s panting, broad chest heaving, his eyes still so confused and afraid.

“You… have to run…” Steve says, each cluster of words requiring a separate breath. His hand is clasping at the seeping wound on his side, ignoring the other he can feel oozing on his chest. His back feels wet- it must have gone right through. “Leave...me...I’ll....find you.”

Bucky just stares at him, looking at each wound on Steve’s body.

“You’re going to die.” Bucky says slowly, as if coming to a slow realization. He crouches, but stays back a few yards, out of reach.

“Nah… I’m…. tougher’n this, Buck.” Steve says, and tries to smile. He’s panting raggedly.

Bucky just watches him, and then cocks his head in the direction of the edge of the forest, back in the direction they came from. Then he looks back to Steve, brows furrowed.

He gets to his feet, all predatory savage grace, and looks down at Steve’s prone figure. For the first time, an emotion other that uncertainty and fear emerges onto his face.

Hard, saddened resolve.

“Don’t come after me.” he says, and turns to go.

Steve immediately panics, hands sliding in the dirt as he tries to get up, “No! No, Bucky!”

He can’t get up, and Bucky disappears into the swirling, nauseous green haze subsuming Steve’s waking world.

“ _Bucky!”_

Steve wakes up screaming, under seven sets of hands trying to hold him down.

He is able to sit up anyway, shoving away a large contingency of nurses and what he thinks is a surgeon. He’s still dizzy, and he starts to slip again.

He realizes, though, that there’s a huge noise around him, and as he looks around, he knows he’s on the floor of a plane.

A cargo plane.

There’s no one else inside the plane besides the medical team.

His body is smeared with blood, fresh and old, and there are instruments and bloody gauze everywhere from where they had been trying to fix his gunshot wounds.

As he turns his head the world swims and blurs, he realizes he’s been drugged with something strong enough to knock even him on his ass.

Steve can’t stop the groan of pain and anger, and he looks up when a figure suddenly appears, standing over the medical staff.

In clean fatigues, with half his face swollen into a massive bruise, is Pierce. 

“Give me a moment with the major please everyone.” Pierce says.

The world swirls and bobs in and out of view, but Steve stares as Pierce approaches and squats directly in front of Steve.

His right arm is in a sling. But his left hand, he raises and puts on Steve’s shoulder, right on the deepest part of the massive burn.

Steve can’t help the keen that comes out of his mouth, unable to lurch away from the oppressive pain. He feels weak as a kitten, disoriented, simultaneously awake and asleep.

“Now let me explain something to you.” Pierce says, his voice deadly low. His dreadful face, once so handsome but now grotesque, swims in front of Steve, “You will return to the States, and you will stay there. You will not leave the continental US without written permission from the Secretary of State. You will not appear in any public capacity. You will not say anything of your time in Vietnam. You will discuss nothing with any media, ever again. You will become a ghost. Not only does Captain America no longer exist, but _you_ no longer exist.”

Steve snarls at him, weak but defiant, and tries to escape.

Pierce’s strong hand squeezes, and Steve gags.

“You’ll do this because that is what is required of you by the United States. And you’ll do this so you can stay alive. And not only so _you_ can live, but also so nothing happens to the people you care about. Howard Stark. Rebecca Barnes. Agent Margaret Carter. Her lovely little family. And if anything, _and I repeat anything_ , is ever mentioned, by you or your network of contacts, about what you saw here, about _who_ you saw here, _you and the people you know will be made to suffer. Am I absolutely clear?_ ”

Steve whole body is shaking with both real and artificial fatigue, staring blearily at Pierce.

He sees no escape and he takes a huge, horrible breath.

His voice is hoarse and dry.

“Where...where are we going?”

“Saigon. You’re discharged, soldier.”

Steve shudders and the wave of tranquilizer crashes back over him, dragging him under.

Ⅶ

It takes Steve a month and a half stateside before he finally caves and tells Howard.

The first two weeks were spent healing; the gunshots were healed in under a week, but the napalm heals slow. In fact, it heals like normal human flesh, suppurating, cracking, aching, taking its time. Even a month later, it’s still scabbed and raw and cracking, whereas the gunshot wounds have disappeared completely.

Almost the entire month Steve spent pacing the floor of his DC apartment, dusty and minimally furnished as it is, berating himself for all the things he didn’t do.

Didn’t save Bucky from falling off the train. Didn’t go back for Bucky afterwards. Didn’t jump off after him and share in his macabre fate. Didn’t ask Bucky enough questions after he was rescued from that lab. Didn’t stop him from disappearing into the jungle like a spectre.

Steve is _trapped_. He’s been herded into a corner and wrapped in an anaconda of bureaucratic red tape so tight he can barely breathe. Everything he wants to know, is dangling out of his reach for eternity.

Howard eventually gets so fed up with Steve dodging his calls, refusing to see him, that he picks the lock of Steve’s door and storms in.

“The _Christ_ is wrong with you, Rogers? You too good to see your friends? There’s people who care about you, you know?” he’s fuming, colour high and brows furrowed hard.

Steve just stares at Howard, who looks exactly the age he should, unlike Bucky, who hasn’t aged a day, just like Steve… and his knees go out.

He collapses onto the floor, face in his hands, letting out a keening wail.

He hears Howard curse and feels hands on his shoulders, holding him gently, panicked.

“Steve? Jesus, I’m sorry, God, what’s wrong?”

And so Steve tells him.

He tells him everything, about Bucky, and Zola’s experiments on him, about Pierce and Bucky’s arm. About the napalm strike called specifically to kill him, the wiping out of his platoon, carrying Private Goertz through the jungle, everything at the MASH.

He tells him about the limitations he has now, about how if anyone goes asking after Pierce or Bucky, everyone is in danger.

Howard is sitting beside Steve on the floor when Steve finally finishes, one arm around his knees, one hand gripping his chin. He looks far away, his forehead pinched.

“So they don’t have him anymore? That’s what you’re saying?”

“I don’t think so. He left before I passed out. But I think… I think he got away.” Steve lets out a ragged sighs and rubs his face hard, “God, I hope so.”

Howard is quiet, not moving at all other than to blink or breathe.

“Our hands are tied, Howard. I’m not… I’m not expecting anything, or _asking_ anything. I just… someone had to know. I thought maybe I was going crazy, god, maybe that napalm actually killed me and I’ve been living some horrible purgatory vision. But it was… it was _Bucky_ , Howard. It was him.”

Howard rubs his chin and heaves a huge sigh, shaking his head.

“I’ll… turn over some soil, Steve. I’ll see what I can do. But…” he gets to his feet, slower now that he isn’t as young as all that anymore, “I can’t risk… well, you know.”

God, does Steve know. All he can think about is Becca, who has her own family in Queens now, and Peggy and her lovely little family, not to mention her position at her agency.

He could ruin it all.

“Don’t...just be careful, Howard. Please.” Steve says.

“I will, I will.” Howard looks around the apartment, and makes a face. “You should, uh… come live with me again. This place is like a Hitchcock movie.”

Steve gives Howard a watery smile and gets up off the unswept floor.

“To be honest, Howard, that’d be… just about perfect.”

Three weeks later, Steve is moved in at Howard’s place just outside DC. It’s a huge property, with an invisible staff, designed by some architect big wig that Howard knows. They each have a wing to themselves, but they have meals together and even though it’s hard for them to recapture the ease they had before, knowing what they know, it’s still easier than living apart and knowing it.

They wallow in their uselessness, angry, impotent and landlocked.

They have a huge cork board of dates, places and names, organized and reorganized a hundred times. They try to sleuth things out without pushing any buttons, going digging…and it all seems to be flying under the radar.

That is, until almost eight months after Steve’s discharge, when Howard comes home, blanched pale.

Steve, who’d been sitting in the den reading, bolts upright.

“What happened?”

Howard comes into the kitchen and leans on the marble island, hands shaking, head bowed.

“I… I was so _careful_ , I don’t…” he rubs his hands through his hair, “I had my secretary copy a page, one _measly page_ , of a file from the fifties about some experiments that had been done on a test subject. It was generic, but it mentioned metal bone grafts, so I thought hey, why not, and…” Howard shudders, “there were agents _standing around my car,_ Steve. They stood there and, god, one of them told me he had a message for me to pass on to Steve Rogers: ‘Keep off the grass’.” Howard is looking at Steve now, eyes wild, “That’s all he said! ‘ _Keep off the grass’_!”

Steve’s whole body feels cold. He feels like his blood has been leached out and replaced with water from the ocean, cold and fraught and aching.

He’s been running without any guidance, and there’s a yawning chasm coming, and he knows he has no choice but to fall into it.

“We have to stop. We… we have to be done, Howard.”

Howard snarls and storms to the sideboard, pours about four fingers of single malt into a crystal tumbler and takes a huge draught. He wipes his mustache with the back of his hand roughly.

“No! No, goddamnit, we have to _catch_ these assholes, Steve! We gotta find out what happened to Barnes, if we can’t find _him._ They tried to have goddamn Captain America killed, for christsake! _”_

“They found you, Howard. And now that they know you’re looking, you’re already in danger. And I’m not risking anything happening to you, or Peggy. We’re done, Howard. We… we’ve gotta be done.”

Howard rails for the rest of the evening, but by midnight, they’re sitting in the darkness of the living room, looking out at the trees through the black windows, just as motionless as they are.

They both know.

They’re done.

It’s five years of quiet.

Five years of nothing.

Five years of Steve hoping to see a face he knows, bobbing towards him in the crowd, and five years of not being able to tell a soul who he hopes that face might be.

In those five years, Steve stays in Howard’s house in DC while Howard builds his company, then gets married to, surprise of surprises, a fellow MIT graduate, Maria, and they move back to Malibu together.

Maria has a son. Peggy has grandkids.

Steve lives alone.

The burn from the napalm never actually heals. It remains as a pink scar, shiny and stiff, and the part that extends up his neck to almost his chin can’t be hidden unless he has a thick scarf. He learns to ignore people looking at it.

He works for Peggy at the SSR, renamed SHIELD, which is both flattering and profoundly embarrassing. He teaches hand to hand, light arms and combat operations to recruits in her agency.

He goes on a few missions within the continental US, establishes a team he trusts. Does as he’s commanded by his handlers, all of whom are twenty years younger than he is.

Inside, he thinks, something vital is broken.

He finds himself sitting in corners, staring off at a point in space. Often, someone will catch him and say he must be ‘deep in thought’. He realizes that he isn’t.

He isn’t thinking of anything at all.

Howard is too happy to be able to see Steve’s sadness, too removed from Steve’s life now that he has a business to run and a family he loves so terribly much.

Peggy is more shrewd. She watches Steve, not obviously, and she corners him a few times.

“You’re miserable.” she tells him.

“I’m nothing.” Steve replies.

And he isn’t. Misery would mean he was connected in some solid way to the world around him, but it all floats past like so much conjecture. His own life becomes a sort of thought experiment, to see how long a human being can endure.

He thinks maybe Erskine screwed up somehow, in that when he made Steve unable to change physically, he made him unable to change mentally too.

His mind, just like his ageless body, is benign and steadfast.

In the spring of ‘73, Nixon invites him to a dinner with all the returned POWs and their families, held in Washington. It’s sent via a courier, with no special addendums.

Steve snarls at it, and throws it out, only to have an identical envelope appear on his desk two days later. This time, it has a small note taped to it in unfamiliar handwriting, that says “Some of these men got tortured, had bits cut off or got chewed by rats. The least you can do is shake their hands, dance with their wives and let their kids meet Captain America.”

Steve throws that one out too, furious at being manipulated by Pierce or whoever it is that’s pulling his strings.

The next day, there’s yet another envelope, this time without a note. Instead, slipped in the card, is a perfectly innocent picture, that would be unremarkable if Steve didn’t know who it was.

It’s a photo of Rebecca Barnes, at a park with her granddaughter. It’s from a distance.

Steve knows when he’s been beaten.

He attends the gala, and he does as he’s told. He smiles, he stands for pictures, he kisses babies, he hugs children, he dances with wives of officials and army men alike. He shakes Nixon’s hand even when he wants to wring his throat.

He says nothing of consequence to anyone.

And when they have him go down the line and shake the hands of all the veterans, all he can think is how he’s failed every one of them.

And how there’s one POW missing.

And how he can’t help him either.

Of course, the Watergate scandal happens only a few months later, so Steve feels at least a little vindicated watching Nixon crumple like a tissue paper figurine.

And then, in April 1975, something changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't already noticed, I've made the executive decision that Steve doesn't age like normal humans, which to me makes sense considering his incredible regenerative abilities (fuck you, Endgame). At this point in the story, he looks about how he did in Civil War.  
> I also decided that, though he can indeed heal, that something so hot, so destructive and so terrible as napalm would cause damage so catastrophic to even his DNA that he wouldn't be able to heal from it like he would a normal burn. Napalm was a HORRIFIC tool of war that maimed and killed hundreds of thousands of non-combatant Vietnamese citizens, and is only one in a long list of atrocities the Americans were responsible for in their ridiculous and fruitless fight against Communism.
> 
> The Glenn Miller song playing on the record player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6L4oG2PXXI


	4. I've Walked and I've Crawled on Six Crooked Highways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All stories have an end, and Steve is desperate for his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to those who've read this...there aren't very many thus far, but I'll just be like Nixon and bank on the silent majority XD

The news reports are pouring in.

The NVA are closing in on Saigon.

Refugees are fleeing away from the encroaching army as it surges south, and the news reels are non stop and terrifying, of truck convoys exploded by rocket fire, roadside bombs, and even mistaken friendly bombings.

It makes Steve sick to even listen to the radio anymore.

He knew something like this would happen. He’d been there, had seen how vastly superior the North Vietnamese Army was at fighting that war of attrition, and the Americans withdrawing support from the South Vietnamese only sped the process along.

Still, the news reels are shocking. Steve can imagine the anarchy happening in the cities, the panic spreading and compounding. There’s video on CNN of civilians in Danang climbing into overloaded rafts and boats, heading out to sea, of children being handed to anyone leaving the docks. Thousands are stranded or drowned in the confusion.

Howard calls him.

“I’ve been commissioned to fly over there and pick up personnelle. And you’re coming with me. There’s a lot of people going to die in horrible ways if we don’t help, and you can get in-country and see if anyone’s seen him lurking around.”

Steve knows he should say no.

“Howard… what about… your _family_ , Howard, Peggy’s family.”

“I think the US military is a tad preoccupied right now to be worried about Captain America sneaking back into Vietnam, and Nixon’s gone, Ford’s busy with the DOW, it’s our best chance, Steve. If you wanna help, we gotta head out right now. I can have a jet at Washington National in an hour to fly you San Francisco.”

Steve swallows hard, his hand not holding the phone to his ear is balled in an iron tight fist. The one that is, makes the plastic receiver creak ominously.

“Is Pierce still in Saigon?”

“No clue. Haven’t asked after him, for obvious reasons. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s got himself a cushy job in the Pentagon right now. What’s it going to be, Steve?”

Steve glares into space, and thinks of Bucky’s back disappearing into the jungle.

“Do it. Send the jet.”

Howard’s enormous cargo plane, nondescript but clearly state of the art, is on the damp tarmac at San Francisco and ready to go when Steve comes down the steps of the little private plane Howard had sent.

There’s a few military types milling about, but Steve ignores them. He waits until he sees Howard, in a linen suit for Christ’s sake, yelling over the sound of engines at one of the ground crew.

Steve raises a hand, and Howard waves him over frantically.

“Let’s get moving. The faster we get in the air, the less likely anyone is to spot you and try and stop us.”

They run up the back ramp, Steve with his duffel over his shoulder. He’d packed his usual black tac gear, all shadowed kevlar and articulated black body shielding, and a few handguns. He hadn’t been sure what to expect, and assumed the actual combat would be minimal. And besides, it wasn’t like Howard Stark couldn’t get his hands on a few weapons.

Howard gets in the pilot’s seat, his butler Jarvis already waiting in the co-pilot seat.

“Mr. Rogers. A pleasure, as usual. Committing treason again, are we?” Jarvis says, smiling pleasantly.

Steve can’t help the laugh that explodes out of his mouth.

“Yeah. I guess we are.”

The flight in the huge plane is 16 hours, and Steve spends the first half of it thinking.

About Bucky. About Pierce. About all the things he’s missed in the last five and a half years.

“ _Let him be alive.”_ Steve says, pressing his hands into his eye sockets, “ _Please let me find him and let him be alive._ ”

He decides he can’t sit alone with himself anymore, and so comes into the cockpit to sit in the jumpseat. He asks Howard about his son, Anthony, and about Maria. Jarvis adds to any and all stories, and Steve lets himself bask in the happiness they clearly are sharing.

“And Ms. Carter comes to visit us often, as well. It really is wonderful- she brings the whole family and we have a lovely time.” Jarvis says, sighing fondly.

Howard is grinning under his mustache and Steve can’t help but smile too.

They’re silent for a little while, until finally Howard says, “You know, we’re just over halfway now, so I may as well tell you, Steve.” he takes a deep breath, “This whole… uh, _deal_ , was Peggy’s idea.”

Steve sits up ramrod straight.

“What? How do you mean?”

“Uh… well. Remember when I got busted by the MPs photocopying research files back in ‘70?”

Steve blinks. “Yes?”

“Well. They uh… didn’t catch Peggy.”

Steve stands up so fast he almost drills his head on the overhead instrument panel.

“Howard! _You told her!?_ How many times did I tell you how important it is that you _not tell her_!?”

“Steve, it’s goddamn _Peggy Carter,_ she’s got x-ray vision! She sees whatever you’re hiding! She got it out of me, I’m sorry!”

“You put her in danger, her husband, her children, her _grandchildren_ in danger, Howard!” Steve is gripping the seatback so hard the leather is splitting.

“She told me to shut my mouth and mind my own business and worry about my own skin! But, you know, in that scathing British way where you feel like you’ve narrowly missed being beheaded. And you know her, she’s… she’s _good_ at what she does, Steve. Better than anyone. She knows how people discount her, and she uses it. And she told me not to tell you jack shit, because she knew you’d get all chivalric and martyr-y like you are _right now!_ ”

“She could have been killed! _Dammit, Howard._ ” Steve sits down heavily, fingers in his hair.

“Yeah, well she didn’t. And she got information where she could, when she could. And she… well, after Watergate, she got a little more room. Pierce lost some of his sway, I think because he didn’t have a terrifying assassin dog on a leash anymore.” Howard winces, and glances back at Steve, “Sorry.”

Steve groans and scrubs his face.

“And for a while she was in charge of debriefing Soviet crossovers.” Howard says, and reaches into a leather messenger bag by his feet, “Which is why she got this.”

In his hands in a file. A slim, recently labelled file, brand new and labelled with a label tape, with the words _“Winter Soldier”_.

Steve takes it, eyebrows raised.

It flops open in his hands, and his mouth falls open.

It’s polaroids.

Polaroids of Bucky.

They aren’t labelled, but judging by the yellowing of the paper, they’re at least a decade old.

Bucky strapped into a doctor-type reclining chair, Bucky restrained with chains, Bucky with 6 IV lines in his arm, Bucky (Steve has to close his eyes and turn his head briefly, swallowing bile) with the entire flesh of one side of his ribcage excised open, revealing the extent of the metal fused to his bones to support the metal arm.

He’s awake in the photo.

Steve closes the file, puts it down on the metal floor.

“Jesus.” he says, and his hands are shaking.

“Yeah.” Howard says. “She… she was given those by a KGB operative who worked under the East German wing of Hydra. Apparently they had him… they called him the Winter Soldier... in the fifties, and then the American’s got him. And she… well, once she saw those. You know her. She doesn’t stop unless you make her stop. And there’s not many people who can do that.”

“She’s crazy.” Steve says, eyes screwed shut.

“Yup. But effective. And she loves you, buddy. She knows what he means to you.”

Steve doesn’t say anything for a very long time.

Howard eventually begins their descent into Vietnam airspace, and Steve pulls out his duffel, stripping off his shirt and getting ready to change.

“What?” Howard says, seeing what Steve’s doing, “No! No, no, no, no, you aren’t wearing those. Look in the big black hard case by the bulkhead back there. That’s for you.”

Steve raises an eyebrow, and then glances at Jarvis, who is looking too innocent.

Steve navigates his way back into the massive empty body of the plane, loud and cavernous, and locates the hard case. He kneels and opens it.

Inside is a suit- a dark blue, highly structured tactical jumpsuit. When Steve lifts it out, he’s amazed at the lightness of it, at its precision and utility in comparison to the heavy outfit he wore in Europe. There’s no bright colours, just the understated navy…

Except, in the centre of the chest, is a star.

Steve sighs.

He returns to the cockpit, holding the suit.

“Howard, I’ve told you fifty times. I’m not Captain America anymore. I can’t wear this.”

Howard grips the handles of his steering column, and looks dead ahead.

“Abraham Erskine and I worked on the serum and the Vita Ray machine for four years together, and before that, he worked on it for twenty three. He escaped Berlin in ‘35 because he was afraid of what his country was becoming, and he smuggled his work out of the Reichstag inside a rolled SS flag.

“ He told me the day before we made you _into you_ that you were without a doubt, the most worthy candidate we could ever encounter. And that if you were to be the culmination of all his life’s work, then he had fulfilled his greatest hopes for his project; a great man with not only the ability to be a hero, but the desire to be one too. And you went out there, and you not only proved him right, you surpassed every expectation ever placed on you. You never quit, never backed down, never broke. And when you should have been done and finished, you picked right back up and kept going when nobody asked you to.” Howard glances at Steve, and then back at the horizon, “That’s you, Steve. It’s who you are. It doesn’t matter what the US government says, what the Army says, what the newspaper or radio says, what _goddamn anybody_ says. You’re Captain America. It’s who you are, in every molecule of your body.”

Steve just stares at the back of Howard’s head, nonplussed and speechless.

“And if it’s any consolation at all, sir, I’d add that the red white and blue incarnation of that suit, I managed to convince Mr. Stark to leave at home.” Jarvis says mildly, smiling in his benign manner at Steve.

“Dammit, Jarvis.” Howard mutters.

Steve doesn’t know what to say, so he settles on placing both hands on Howard’s shoulders from behind.

“Thanks, Howard. For everything.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get dressed.”

They land on the dark black ink that is the ocean at night, the belly lander plane skiing into the harbor. All the battleships are lined up, lights blaring white and yellow, sonars spinning, decks crawling with people. Even inside the cockpit, they can hear the sirens blaring across the bay.

Steve can already feel the soldier’s mindset creeping back into his mind; try as he might to crush it, he was made for this.

“You jumping ship before we dock?” Howard asks, steering towards a massive concrete wharf.

Steve frowns. “No. I have an idea. Just follow my lead.”

They dock among other battleships, with tanks and trucks rolling up ramps loaded with materiale. Steve inhales a huge breath of air, squares his shoulders and walks into the belly of the plane. He comes to a halt at the top of what will be the stairs onto the wharf.

He’s about to press the button, when Howard calls his name.

“Cap. Hang on a second.”

Steve turns, and his heart skips.

Howard is standing there, smiling a wry smile, holding the shield.

“You’re missing something.” Howard says, grinning slowly.

Steve hesitates for only a second, before approaching Howard.

He holds out a hand, but he’s afraid to touch it. It’s been almost thirty years since he saw it, and he’s still afraid of it, afraid of what it means, of the legacy is carries.

“Howard, I…”

“It’s yours, Steve. It’s only ever been yours.”

Steve sighs, and reaches out.

It settles into his hold like the handshake of an old friend, familiar and solid, fitting his hands like it never left.

“Thank you, Howard.” Steve says, turning the shield over in his hands a few times. He swings it up onto his back, where the magnetic pieces in the shoulder harness of his suit hold it for him, just as he knew they would.

Howard grins at him, wide and proud.

“You look good.” he says, hands on his hips.

Steve can’t help but roll his eyes, but smiles right back.

He presses the button, and the doors hisses with equalizing pressure and then opens, unfolding onto the concrete below. He schools his expression back into one of austere superiority, clasping his hands behind his back. He knows he cuts an imposing figure on any day, but the new suit accentuates the breadth of his shoulders and chest, cutting in tight to his narrow waist and thick arms.

Sure enough, the men on the wharf stare with slack jawed expressions, and immediately snap into a salute when Steve starts his calculated descent.

“C-Captain America!” says a nearby Lieutenant, who appears to be the highest ranking person in the vicinity, “We… we had no idea you were coming!”

Steve’s about to open his mouth with the rote response of “It’s Major Rogers, actually” when he realizes that he isn’t Major Rogers anymore.

He feels the weight of the shield on his back. Feels Howard’s gaze on the back of his head, feels Peggy’s trust deep in his chest, Dr. Erskine’s profound faith in every molecule of his body… Bucky’s fate, in his the marrow of his bones.

He could be Captain America.

“At ease, Lieutenant. I need a Jeep for Mr. Stark and myself. We’re rounding up civilians and getting them out of here.”

The Lieutenant glances at a nearby corporal, who looks equally confused.

“Er…well, Captain, sir, our orders are to-”

“Don’t tell me what your orders are, son. I just told you what your orders are. A Jeep, please, and quick about it.”

The streets of Saigon at night are rainslicked and packed with panicked people. Everyone is trying to find their way out of the city, including many South Vietnamese ARVN army trying to escape the inevitable sack of the city.

They drive at ridiculous speeds towards the American embassy, darting in and out of crowds, and the smell in the air, of smoke, exploded rockets, rain… it all comes back to Steve. It’s like he never left.

There’s eight marines on the gate at the embassy, yelling and waving at the massive crowd formed around them. There’s people shouting back, waving pages of documentation and photos of American’s they know, begging to be let in and evacuated.

Steve and Howard abandon the jeep when the crowd gets too thick, and Steve’s massive shoulders carve them a swath through the to the gates. They’re immediately let in on sight, no questions asked. Steve stares around the nighttime yard, his eyes and head swivelling as he surveys the area. There’s large trees, deep shadows. He isn’t sure why he knows Bucky is nearby- he could be anywhere in the world right now, but for some reason, he feels like he _knows_.

“I’m going to start talking to people in charge around here. Organize what I can. What’s your plan?” Howard says.

Steve nods to himself.

“I’ll stick with you. Let people know we aren’t playing around and we aren’t going to waste time. Let’s save as many civilians as we can. We can at least get them out of Saigon, and we’ll worry about logistics later.”

“You’re sure?” Howard says.

“Yup. Let’s get to work.”

They start with the group out front, trying to get the hundreds of panicked civilians to head towards Howard’s waiting plane. It takes some coaxing, translating and Steve using his ‘Captain America’ voice on a few American marines to get them to cooperate.

They try to get as many large families as they can, and even though they have every right to panic, Steve’s presence seems to calm everyone. Even though the American’s have lured the South Vietnamese into a drawn out war, gotten so many of them killed, and then abandoned them to their fate, Steve as a symbol of the United States seems to reassure their frightened faces.

As people start to see what’s happening, more and more people flood into the nighttime streets. Howard calls in two more cargo planes from Taiwan and Tokyo, and Steve uses his loud voice to direct crowds and crowds of people to the docks.

A rocket goes off at 4 am, exploding a few streets over, and that’s when the real panic starts to set in. Steve can’t stop them running if he tried, the flow of humanity surging along narrow roads. One of the marines yells and points his gun in the air, and Steve can see the future in that moment.

Before he’s even aware of what he’s doing, the shield is off his back and whistling through the air, cleaving the rifle in half and embedding itself in the wall behind it.

The marine just stares, slack jawed, at his half M-15.

Steve shoulders his way through the crowd, pulling his shield out of the wall and replacing it on his back.

The marine just stares at him, and swallows in almost comic dread.

“I think more panic is the _last_ thing we need, son.” Steve says, patting him hard on the shoulder, before heading towards the docks with everyone else.

There’s a backlog at the pier, and Steve sees a line of American soldiers, all holding weapons.

There’s a Major standing at the front, yelling and pointing and waving his arms at the crowd gathering in front of him and his line up.

“There’s no air lifting happening here! I’ve got no word of it, and if I don’t know, then it isn’t happening! Who the hell do you think you are?”

Steve shoulders his way to the front, and the major visibly deflates as soon as he sees him.

“Captain America.” he says, in that awed, disbelieving way Steve always gets.

“Howard Stark and I are organizing a mass civilian airlift. If you want to streamline this, then get your men to help, or step aside.”

The major’s eyes flick over the crowd, and then back to Steve.

“I… I have orders, sir.” he looks like he regrets every word out of his mouth.

Steve isn’t wearing his major’s bars, and still he’s being called sir.

“Who’s the ranking officer in Saigon right now?” Steve presses.

The major’s eyes go from Steve to a few nearby crowd members, who all are watching him.

“C… Colonel Pierce was the last... who I spoke to… but... well, there’s a chopper coming to get him-”

Steve’s blood runs Antarctic cold, and then flashes bright hot with volcanic rage.

“Where? _Where is h_ e?” Steve steps forward, and he’s fisted his hand in the front of the major’s uniform before he’s even aware that he’s moved.

The soldiers around the major lurch into motion, but all of them are visibly terrified of pointing a gun at Captain America.

“The embassy! He has an office on the top floor! He’s been hiding in there, giving orders over the radio! I haven’t seen him in a month! There’s a Huey coming to evac him and his personnel tonight!” The major is grabbing at Steve’s hand, scrabbling ineffectually.

There’s a series of booms behind the crowd, and Steve can see explosions reflecting in the major’s eyes as more rockets are fired into Saigon. There’s the rattle of machine gun fire in the distance.

The NVA are here, and they’re going to take the city in a matter of hours.

“You’re going to start loading people on the plane. And I’m going to go _explain the situation_ to Colonel Pierce. Am I understood?” Steve says, jaw clenched.

The major nods frantically, and Steve lowers him to the ground again. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding him up.

Steve turns and begins to wade back through the crowd, all of whom are visibly terrified as more rockets and explosions go off. The air is smelling more and more smoky.

He finds Howard at the back of the crowd, sitting in a jeep and talking into a HAM radio on the seat beside him, yelling into the receiver and holding a headset up to his ear.

Steve yanks the whole deal out of his hand, throws it in the back and gets in, glowering at Howard’s indignant face.

“ _I was using tha-”_

“Pierce is here.” Steve cuts him off, “At the embassy. He’s being evac’d before morning.”

Howard’s brows furrow deeply. “He...what? No one said anything about him. I had all of the ranking officers with me getting cars mobilized. You’re sure?”

“Sure or not, I’m still going to look.” Steve says, and points in the direction of the embassy, “Drive.”

They drive past streams of people, some with baggage but many without, all running towards the harbor.

Howard doesn’t slow, and Steve is staring hard into the middle distance, brows pinched.

He isn’t sure what he’ll do if he finds Pierce. There’s a lot of things he knows he should ask, but there’s a large part of him that want to simply throttle the man, or throw him out a window.

He wants to hear it from Pierce’s lips who ordered the napalm strike on him and his team. He wants to know how the American army ended up acquiring Bucky, a Hydra weapon made by a German, utilized by the Soviets.

They’re in a quieter part of the city near the embassies, where the rich would have lived if they hadn’t already paid their way out of Vietnam. There’s nobody on the streets, no trucks and no army blockades.

They whip around a corner towards the embassy, and Howard swears and slams on the brakes.

Because Bucky is standing in the middle of the road, facing them, still as a statue.

Steve is out of the jeep before it comes to a stop, one hand stretched out like he’s trying to calm a spooked wild animal.

Bucky looks not too dissimilar to how he did when Steve last saw him- his hair is still long, the top half tied back behind his head, and he has a close beard. He’s in rough American fatigues, most of his silver arm covered by faded dirty green material. In his flesh hand he’s holding a gun, in the metal one, what appears to be a huge specialized grenade. He’s got a massive buck knife strapped to one thigh, and a bandolier of small hand grenades across his torso.

His skin glistens with sweat and smears of dirt, and his eyes are wild and gleaming in the headlights.

He’s heartbreakingly beautiful.

His brows are furrowed, but he’s looking at Steve with frightening lucidity.

“Bucky.” Steve says, taking a few steps closer. He’s trying to keep his voice steady, but it’s difficult. He feels like Bucky must be a hallucination, and he’s asleep on the plane or, God, maybe back in the States.

Bucky’s eyes flit from Steve to Howard, who is staring with a slack face of complete shock.

“You shouldn’t be here. Why are you here?” Bucky says sharply. His voice is much more sturdy than the unsure quaver Steve had heard last.

“For you, Buck. I’m here to find you.” Steve keeps approaching, and he doesn’t move away.

Bucky frowns at him, his whole face darkening.

“No.” he says, “Go home. It’s not safe here anymore.”

Steve is within a yard of him now, and he can see the grain of his skin, the striations in the blue of his irises, the sheen on the sweat on his neck. It’s taking every ounce of self control he has not to touch him.

“Come with us. Come with us, Bucky, _please_.”

Bucky shakes his head.

“I can’t go with you, Steve. You need to leave.”

Steve’s breathing is hard and sharp in his chest, and hearing Bucky say his name so easily makes his whole body ache with longing.

“Not without you, Buck. _Never_ without you. Not ever again.”

At this, Bucky makes an actual huff of frustration.

Steve takes a calculated risk, unable to hold himself at bay any longer, and puts a hand on Bucky’s flesh shoulder.

Bucky still doesn’t move, just glances quickly at Steve’s arm, and then up at his face.

His brow creases suddenly, and his lips press into a frown. His flesh hand puts away the pistol he’s holding and quickly, with a strange sort of concerned air, his hand comes up to Steve’s chin.

Steve’s breath hitches in his chest. Bucky is staring at where his hand is, and Steve feels his thumb graze over the pink napalm scar on the edge of his jaw, and where it trails down and gets wider down his neck, before disappearing under the suit. Bucky’s brows draw in, annoyed at the old wound he’s seeing.

Then his eyes dart back up to Steve’s, and his hand falls heavily back to his side. His face returns to the careful neutral of before.

“Go home, Steve.” Bucky says, very quietly.

Steve shakes his head, hard, and his throat is aching from choking on unshed tears, and he is helpless to stop himself from stepping in closer and enfolding Bucky in his arms, one around behind his shoulders, the other tight around his waist.

“I won’t. I won’t leave you.” Steve says, face pressed into Bucky’s throat.

He smells of heat and life and jungle, rust and sweat, and Steve fills his lungs with him like a greedy child filling their pockets. He’s been dreaming of finding him and holding him for almost six years, but not a single dream comes close to the starving, grasping ache of reality. He can feel every breath, every beat of his heart… that same wonderful heart he’d known since he was a boy, 50 years ago.

Bucky is motionless under Steve’s arms, stiff and unyielding.

“ _Steve.”_ It’s Howard’s voice cutting through the fog surrounding them, “If we’re gonna get Pierce, we gotta go _now_.”

Bucky lurches in Steve’s arms, shoving him away. His eyes are wild again, his crimson lips dragging in huge lungfuls of air.

“ _Pierce_?” he says, and there’s a mechanical whir coming from his arm as he clenches his fists, “Where?” he grabs Steve this time, both hands on Steve’s shoulders, thumbs pinching onto his clavicles, _hard_ , “ _You know where he is_?”

Steve nods, hands coming up to hold both Bucky’s wrists, just for the contact, “The embassy. He’s at the US embassy, top floor. I’m gonna get him, Buck.”

Bucky looks calculating, going to Steve and to Howard behind him. Steve can almost see the wheels turning.

Then, in a blur of movement so fast even Steve can’t defend against it, he gets an undercut to the diaphragm with the metal arm, effectively dropping him onto the ground and incapacitating him.

There’s a hissing noise too, like the air being let out a tire, and Bucky saying “ _Don’t. Follow me_.”

Steve is folded on the ground, both arms around his middle, eyes streaming, coughing and gasping and gagging.

He can blearily see Bucky disappearing at a rate of speed only Steve is able to run.

But he can’t give up now.

Steve rolls onto his knees as Howard reaches him, and feels hands on his back.

“Jesus! _Jesus_ , you went down like a stone! Are you alright? Christ, he could have killed you!”

Steve just shakes his head and wheezes, trying to wave Howard off.

“No… no…” Steve gasps, and gets one foot under him. He feels Howard get his arms under his armpit and together they are able to lever him onto his feet, “He knows what’ll ...kill me and what...won't. It’s the same… for him.” Steve drags in a breath and gasps out another one.

He glances at the jeep- just as he thought, there’s a small knife sticking out of a very flat tire, which is still whistling as it goes down.

“Steve.” Howard says, his voice a vague warning.

Steve runs.

His chest and abdomen ache awfully, but he pushes it out of his mind. He _has_ to catch him. Has to find him.

There’s more rockets being fired into the city from all sides, and there are fire alarms and sirens blaring around him. It’s a storm of sound and smoke, the world glowing with distant flames illuminating the massive cloud over the city, occasionally striped by spotlights from the harbor and airport. The electricity is flickering on and off, and Steve is running through wet streets, so fast it only takes him another few minutes to skid into the yard at the embassy.

It’s already in chaos when Steve arrives, men groaning on the ground. The door is ripped off its hinges, and several soldiers are getting gingerly to their feet.

“Where!?” Steve yells, grabbing one by the collar and shaking him, “Where did he go? The man with the long hair and metal arm, _did he go inside_?!” 

“Yes! Yes, Jesus, he went in!” the man sputters, trying to pry Steve’s fingers off him.

Steve drops him and runs in through the broken door, its massive metal hinges twisted and warped with tremendous force. There’s a massive marble staircase and he’s already leaping up it, taking the steps four at a time and whirling around each landing with a hand on the banister, making the whole thing creak.

It’s at about floor ten when he almost crashes into an elite force of soldiers, all dressed in black. None of them have any bars, badges or stripes denoting them as part of the army, but Steve recognizes them almost immediately; they’re part of Pierce’s elite force.

They all stare at him, clearly not expecting Captain America to come running up the stairs behind them.

There’s twelve of them, and they all pivot to face him, forming a menacing semi-circle.

Steve stands his ground, arms at his sides, shoulders back.

“I’m only going to say this once; let me through.” his voice is hard and unwavering and gives absolutely no quarter.

“Can’t do that, sir.” says the nearest man, raising his huge custom rifle to Steve’s chest.

Steve doesn’t flinch. He slowly takes a step forward, closer to the barrel pointed at the star on the centre of his chest. 

He holds eye contact with the agent, and takes another step until the muzzle is pressed right over his heart.

He says nothing, just stares at the man, stone faced.

Steve can feel all the agents looking at each other. He knows none of them want to be the man who shoots Captain America, unarmed and point blank.

“We.... have orders.” the agent says, and he’s breathing faster now.

Steve snarls at him and his hand comes up in a blur, grabbing the barrel and slapping it away from his chest…

… right as a massive explosion rocks the building.

All the agents around Steve stumble as the building shakes violently, and it’s Steve who recovers first, spinning into a roundhouse kick and sending the man who’d been pointing the gun at him flying into three other agents.

Steve punches another over the railing, and then he’s sprinting up the stairs again as smoke alarms start ringing, and the sprinklers come on, effectively dousing him and the slippery marble stairs.

His stomach still aches from the armbar Bucky gave him, and his feet are squeaking and sliding on the steps as he leaps up them, but he can’t stop now.

He hears gunshots and screams from above in the stairwell, and tries to run even faster. He’s left the agents behind him by a few floors now, and he can’t hear them over the shrill rattle of the alarms.

As he nears ascends, he can see that the water running down the steps is changing colour- first to a dilute orange, but then redder and redder until it’s clear that there’s blood in the stream trickling past his feet.

“Shit, shit, shit, _shit_.” Steve says, throwing himself around a landing. He tries to blink water out of his eyes, shaking his head sharply.

He almost steps on the dead man, who’s haphazardly strewn across the stairs. He’s American, in fatigues, and he’s been shot in the head, precisely between the eyes.

Steve keeps running, and he hears more shouting and more gunshots, closer this time, and panicked yelling and then more shots.There’s still blood pouring down the stairs, more now in fact, and it’s actually making the stairs slicker and greasier under his boots.

He comes hurtling around a corner, feet sliding in the bloody water, and comes face to face with a scene of carnage unfolding.

There’s a team of about eight men, all of whom appear to be in the non-descript outfit of Pierce’s men, trying to kill Bucky, and they are absolutely not succeeding. Steve doesn't slow, just rips the shield off his back and hurls it at the nearest agent, sending him flying forward into a wall, head first. Steve catches it on a rebound, takes a running leap and, using his momentum, does a flying aerial kick to the next man’s back, crashing him right into Bucky.

Bucky is a ruthless, brutal, spectacular fighter; his balance is balletic, but he’s a machine of unrelenting force and terrifying precision. Steve watches as he uses his metal arm to throw one man into another, using the momentum of the throw to tuck, roll, land on his back and handspring up with his metal arm into another man. He kicks the barrel of a rifle away from his head, spinning in perfect acrobatic fashion and is up on his feet, then flying roundhouses yet another man off the landing into the stairwell below.

Steve uses the shield to bash another man into a wall, and punches another when he tries to slash at him with a huge combat knife. Bucky catches the knife from the falling man’s hand and hurls it with inhuman precision into the throat of a man trying to aim at him with a handgun.

The last man standing is just turning when Bucky backhands his rifle with his metal arm, and then shoots him point blank with the pistol he has in his other hand.

Then it’s just the two of them, equally drenched as the sprinklers pour above them.

But before Steve can open his mouth, Bucky has him by the front of the uniform with his metal hand, and tosses him back down the nearest flight of stairs.

As he lands in a clattering heap on the landing, Steve hears him yell, “I _said_ not to follow me!”

Steve grits his teeth as he gets back up, disoriented from the impact but largely unhurt.

“ _Dammit, Buck._ ” he hisses into the cacophony of the fire alarm, and starts back up the stairs, weaving around the bodies of the men they’d just defeated.

Bucky has disappeared into the fog, and Steve knows he’s continued up.

So Steve continues up as well. 

Smoke is filling the corridors and stairwell, getting thicker and blacker, and it smells of burning plastic and insulation. He sees flames at the far end of one hall, and walls and floors are missing.

“Bucky!” he shouts, and he hears a yell above him by a few floors, and then more gunshots.

There’s a trail of more bodies, agents, army men, all dead and collapsed on the steps exactly where they died. Some have been shot with chilling precision, others with their necks clearly snapped by what Steve can only assume is a metal cybernetic hand.

It continues like this, a trickle of bodies to follow like breadcrumbs, until finally the stairs stop.

As Steve reaches the top floor, he starts coughing uncontrollably. The smoke is so thick he can barely see, and his eyes start watering. The floor is pooled with blood and ash, and Steve is reminded chillingly of the napalm from six years earlier.

There’s roaring flames at the end of the hall, making the smoke glow. Steve stumbles in that direction, arms outstretched in case he bumps into anything or anyone.

“Bucky!” he shouts again, coughing and blinking away the smoke, tears pouring down his face as his eyes water.

He trips over a body, and sees it’s yet another of Pierce’s elite agents, his throat slit expertly. There’s more bodies, too, killed in a variety of ways but all with the same ruthless precision.

Steve continues on, and it’s because of the thick smoke, he almost falls into the huge hole blown in the side of the building.

The hole is massive, spanning several floors, which makes sense of what Steve had seen down the hall as he climbed higher in the building. It goes up the roof as well, smoke pouring out of the gaping wound in a massive cloud, and Steve looks around, trying to get his bearings.

There’s a huge mahogany and leather desk, charred papers flying everywhere in the vacuum caused by the fire, and ash and debris is swirling across the marble floor in little cyclones.

There’s a private staircase in the corner, and near the door, laying on the ground, frame broken and glass shattered, is a photo of Alexander Pierce shaking hands with Richard Nixon, beaming and handsome and proud.

Steve looks back to the private staircase.

If you’re on the top floor, and the threat is coming at you from below, what’s your only option to get away?

Steve approaches the stairwell, and sees the door had been ripped open. There’s five distinct grooves in the metal, each corresponding to a finger.

Steve steps into the stairway, much smaller and more secret than the other. There’s smoke pouring in from the hole in the wall, and Steve can see the glowing smokey night sky if he looks up.

He throws himself up the stairs, and he comes careening out onto the roof at full speed, feet sliding on the rubble. The smoke is thick and then thin and then thick again as massive gusts of hot air blast around him, his wet hair drying as it blows every which way.

He’s 25 stories up, on one of the highest buildings in Saigon, and he can see fires all over the city now from rockets.

“Bucky!” he shouts, squinting through the smoke.

He starts to walk, looking around wildly, eyes streaming and lungs starting to ache. He starts coughing, and he’s reminded rudely of the winter of 1936, when he got bronchitis from a regular old cold.

“Bucky!” he calls out again, and as he nears the partially obscured massive hole in the roof, he sees him.

Or rather; sees _them_.

Bucky is standing right near the hole, his soaked dark hair gleaming in the firelight, chrome arm reflecting the flames and gleaming bright like a cinder.

With that arm, he’s got Pierce by the throat, and is holding him out at arms length, dangling him over the hole in the building.

“ _Bucky!”_ Steve leaps a metal vent and comes closer, coughing again.

Bucky doesn’t look around at him. He’s staring at Pierce, his blue eyes full of nothing but hatred and the fire surrounding them.

It’s _unbelievably_ hot this near the fire, and Steve can see the Pierce is burned. He’s very much alive though, scrabbling desperately at Bucky’s relentless metal fingers.

“Stop there, Steve.” Bucky says, his voice hard and loud. He doesn’t look around.

Steve stops where he is, about fifteen feet away. 

“Talk to me, Buck.” Steve says earnestly.

Bucky’s head turns, and he looks at Steve out of the corner of his eye.

“I told you not to follow me.” he says flatly.

“And if you remember me at all, you knew that wasn’t gonna happen.”

Bucky goes back to looking at Pierce, and his jaw clenches.

“I’m not going to let you take him.” Bucky hisses.

Steve’s eyes go to Pierce, who is desperately trying to pry the fingers off his trachea.

“We can turn him in, Buck. Put him on trial. Show the American people what he’s done.”

“He dies here. He contributed to this mess; he’s going to die in it.”

Steve takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

He doesn’t want to take this away from Bucky. If anyone deserves it, it’s him. But he knows how Pierce can serve Bucky better than by dying.

“We can _save_ you, Buck. He can testify what happened to you. You can come _home_.” Steve takes another step closer, but Bucky’s head whips around to stare at him.

There’s so much profound sadness in his eyes, so much anger and loss and acceptance of his guilt.

“There’s no saving me, Steve.” Bucky says quietly, and Steve feels his heart breaking in his chest.

Suddenly there’s a crash behind him, and Steve whips around as a dozen agents pour out onto the roof.

“Freeze!” one shouts as the agents fan out.

Steve looks back, and he sees that Bucky has Pierce clasped to his chest now, metal arm locking him against him, acting as a shield between him and the agents.

Pierce must have his mouth free, because he lets out a huge hacking cough and shouts “ _Fucking shoot him, for christssakes!”_

“Which one, sir!?” shouts the agent in charge as they inch closer.

“ _Either of them!”_ Pierce shouts, and there’s a crunch as Bucky adjusts his hold to bring his arm around Pierce’s throat, effectively silencing him.

Steve doesn’t dare take his eyes off the agents, who are trying to flank him and Bucky.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Bucky take a step backwards towards the yawning chasm of the blown out building dragging Pierce with him. The building is collapsing, and the hole is now more than ten stories of glowing inferno.

“ _Buck_ ,” Steve says in warning, holding out an arm in his direction but also at the nearest agent.

“Release the colonel and get down on your knees!” shouts another agent, inching closer step by step.

“Stand down!” Steve yells, arms still outstretched, trying to be placating.

“Stand aside, Captain Rogers!” another agent has a different weapon, which looks like a modified enormous stun gun, black and terrifying, “Or I’ll have to put you down!”

Steve opens his mouth to retort, but he freezes when he hears Bucky’s voice.

“ _Steve_!”

Steve turns, and Bucky is glaring at him, eyes sharp and bright as starlight.

“I need you to make me a promise. Okay?”

Steve flounders, but nods despite himself.

“I need you to promise me that you’ll keep going. You have to _keep going_. The world needs you.”

Steve can feel his whole body thrumming with tension. He wants to leap at the nearest agent and rip him apart for even daring to point his gun at Bucky, and he wants to leap at Bucky and wrap him in his arms and never let him go again.

For some reason, his mind is being dragged back in time. All he can hear is the melodic rasp of big band swing played on a phonograph record player, echoing down the hall and into their apartment.

He can see Bucky, suspenders dropped off his shoulders, arms tanned from working outdoors, bangs hanging rakishly over his forehead. _Let’s dance, Stevie! It don’t gotta be just the little girls that get a turn._ The roguish wink and salacious grin that deserved a clip round the ear.

“ _Bucky, I don’t-”_ Steve says, hands clenched in tight fists.

“Promise me! I said _promise me,_ Steve.” Bucky isn’t shouting. He’s assured and calm.

Steve swallows hard, and his tongue tastes like blood and ash.

“I… I promise.”

“ _Release the colonel and get down on the ground!”_ yells an agent.

Bucky takes another tiny step backwards, eyes never leaving Steve’s, and Steve suddenly realizes what’s about to happen.

“ _Bucky!”_ Steve shouts for all he’s worth, and he moves towards him, but there’s a strange _snap_ , and suddenly every muscle is cramping and convulsing as waves of electricity course through him.

He falls onto his hands and knees, fighting with every molecule he’s worth to stop from collapsing entirely.

He watches Bucky, watches his silhouette in the roaring rising flames behind and around him. He looks like a creature sprung from the depths of hell, a fallen angel made of memories and metal.

Bucky just nods at Steve, tiny and private, and then takes a big step backwards, bringing Pierce with him, falling off the precipice into the huge yawning hole below.

Steve comes to screaming, yet again.

He’s restrained and immobile, and he howls with rage and anguish, straining ineffectually at his bindings.

Bucky’s gone.

He’s fallen, again, and again, Steve wasn’t close enough to grab him.

Howard is suddenly over him, and his eyes are red, his face lined with fear and grief.

“Steve, _Steve, Steve,_ calm down, _please calm down_.” Howard begs, voice shaking, a hand on Steve’s forehead.

Steve realizes he’s sobbing, dragging in huge shuddering lungfuls of air.

“ _He’s gone._ He’s _gone_ and I couldn’t stop it.”

“I know. I know, _God,_ I’m sorry Steve. I’m so sorry.” Howard says, and his voice breaks.

“He’s gone. I lost him, he’s gone.” Steve can’t stop repeating it over and over, chest heaving with sobs between each word.

“I’ll let you up, but you gotta promise me you won’t do anything stupid.” Howard says, and suddenly Steve’s arms are free.

Steve barely sits up before he’s being embraced, and he lets himself be held as he cries and cries.

He’d been so close.

He’d been so close to having him, but he’d been too late. Too far, too slow.

For the second time in far too many and too few years, he’s watched Bucky fall away from him.

“I’m sorry, Steve. I’m sorry.” Howard says, squeezing Steve tight.

Steve is aware that he’s on a modified stretcher in the belly of a cargo plane, hidden behind ammunition crates. He’s aware there’s no one around to watch Captain America dissolve, and this is a conscious decision made by people smarter than him.

But none of it matters at all to him.

So he holds Howard tight and sobs.

He doesn’t really come conscious again until he’s sitting on the guest bed in Howard’s home in Malibu.

He’d gone more or less catatonic, staring into middle space for the whole flight back to the States, for the disembarking, for the ushering into a secret van and driving hours back to Howard’s home.

He’d stared right past Maria, who’d gasped at his and Howard’s faces when she opened the door.

Anthony, who was only five, had stared at Steve just as owlishly as his mother, but with less comprehension and more fear.

And now, Steve sat on the guest bed, still in his modified new uniform, and blinked back into reality.

He’d failed.

He’d gone back to try find Bucky. And he had- but he’d lost him just as quickly, as cruelly and suddenly as he had in 1945.

Steve puts his head in his hands, rakes them through his hair.

And all he could think, was what was it that he and Bucky had done that had made God hate them so. What cosmic wrong had they done that made it that they could survive years beyond mortal means, just to be taken away from each other again, in the same way?

He got to his feet, shaky and unsteady, and peeled himself out of the costume. He made himself shower, just standing blankly under the spray and letting the water rinse away the salt and ash from his skin. He dried himself in a daze, avoiding the mirror at all costs.

He climbed into the huge king sized bed and stared at the wall opposite, and wondered how many more years of this torturous life he would have to live before the serum finally gave up and let him go.

Ⅷ

The MPs come and get him and Howard four days later.

They’re flown on a small military jet to Washington in handcuffs. They don’t have any special strong ones, but Steve doesn’t have the heart to break them.

They go on special trial in the Supreme Court building for about three hours, at which point Peggy comes storming into the room and shouts a bit. About what, Steve doesn’t really listen. He’s a few hundred miles away, and about four decades. She has a massive stack of files and a wild look in her eye that says that if he knows anything at all, it’s to keep his mouth shut.

They're released after another six hours of debating across the table, and manage to evade the forest of press camped outside. A helicopter took them to SSR headquarters in New York, and Steve is installed in yet another temporary bedroom, this one even more impersonal and devoid of life.

It doesn’t matter to him all that much- he feels like he was barely attached to his own body, is just hovering above it, a single fibre holding him down. It’s as if he is watching himself pass through the world as a husk, watching impartially as someone he doesn’t know walks his body around.

He’d failed.

The next few years are a forest of publicity, wherein he testifies at various trials, hearings, councils. He goes on the stand when the evidence against Pierce and his cronies come out, implicating them in war crimes. He testifies against the war effort in general. He’s protested by those who supported the war effort, and lauded by those who did not.

He refuses talk-shows and public appearances.

He lives by himself in a little apartment in Staten Island, away from anything too familiar.

He consults occasionally at Peggy’s agency, now a massive international conglomerate with millions of moving parts. He does as he’s asked, as usual.

For the most part, though, he stays in his apartment. He reads books. He takes long walks. He rides his motorcycle on long cross country tours, up and down, East and West.

He doesn’t draw.

Any thoughts of Bucky are avoided. The guilt, the anger, the regret, have all fused into a firewall through which there is no passage. The memory of Bucky lives in a prison in Steve’s mind, with no windows to look in or out of.

Outside of a professional setting, Steve mostly stays away from Peggy and Howard. He knows they will only express their worry for him, their pity, their love. He doesn’t want any of it. Peggy’s moved to DC, where her main agency has its headquarters, and Howard flies between his Manhattan base and Malibu.

Steve is far enough out of their way, he hasn’t seen either of them outside of a courtroom since 1976.

In the early spring of 1979, a call comes.

He and Howard are going to be awarded medals by the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, for their efforts to evacuate trapped Vietnamese civilians in Saigon four years earlier; Steve, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Howard, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Steve hedges on declining, but the award is leaked to the press by someone in the White House, and Steve knows he has to accept then.

He flies to DC on a windy Wednesday, the sky grey and the world greyer. It’s been a long cold spring, without a spell of warm enough weather to start the trees greening or the grass growing.

He has a few hours after he checks into his hotel- which is actually The President’s Guest House hotel- and he takes a cab to Peggy’s condo.

She’s been semi-retired for two years now, working only a few days a week, or as much as she wants, which apparently is quite a bit more than only a few days. Steve’s heard about her in the occasional memos, the occasional passing discussion, read a piece about her in TIME.

He hasn’t really spoken to her in… God, years and years.

The taxi drops him off outside a huge, spectacularly maintain condo building, with glass doors with doormen in uniforms.

Steve, in his Levi’s, well loved Adidas sneakers and navy windbreaker, immediately feels too shabby to even be on the property.

As he approaches, the doorman beams at him as he lets Steve in.

“Who are you here for, sir?” he asks.

“Uh...Carter? Mrs. Peggy Carter?” Steve tries a charming smile, which he’s a bit out of practice at these days.

The doorman looks delighted. “Oh! Another one for the party, eh? Right on up then. 1501, can’t miss it.”

_Party?_ Steve swallows but continues to the elevator when he’s let through the interior door.

The elevator is a swank number in polished slate and mirrors, and Steve glances at himself and grimaces. He leans nearer and rakes his nails through his beard, trying to get it all to lay flat, and takes off his Rangers cap and tries to get his hair to behave perhaps a bit, but it’s too long now to be combed into the style he used to do. It’s era appropriate, certainly, but not the tidily slicked hair Peggy had seen him in the most.

The doors ding, and he steps out into a beautifully appointed marble hall, with real paintings and actual cut calla lilies in a vase on a little table. It even _smells_ classy.

Steve approaches 1501, and steeles himself.

It sounds like a party inside, raucous and warm and friendly. All the things Steve hasn’t been in… decades.

He doesn’t belong among the happy normal people, with wonderful lives, careers, social lives.

He was made into a weapon, not a social butterfly.

He turns as if to go, when suddenly the door opens, and there’s Peggy’s husband Brian. He’s older, greyer, thicker in the middle, but beaming from ear to ear, a bag of empty cans in one hand.

He falters as he sees Steve, and then beams again, only wider.

“Steve! What a surprise! I had no idea you were coming!”

Steve immediately tries to recover, smiling back and laughing.

“I...yeah, it’s a bit unannounced, I guess. I can come back later, or-”

“Nonsense! We’re just bringing out the cake, come on in!” Brian waves Steve in, clapping him on the back as he ushers Steve into the beautiful foyer. He looks up at Steve’s face and shakes his head in wonder. “Christ, but… you haven’t aged a _day_ since… hell, since I _met_ you! You don’t have a grey hair on your head!”

“Nah, there’s a couple here and there in the beard.” Steve says abashedly, cheeks heating and looking down at his feet as he kicks off his shoes.

“Well, sure, but you’re still built like a brick shithouse. Not carrying around the old spare tire, eh?” he pats his belly a few times, grinning unapologetically.

Almost forty years on, and Steve is still amazed and envious of how completely comfortable the man is in his own skin.

“Who is it, darling?” there’s the click of heels, and in comes Peggy, who is just as ravishing as ever, her hair streaked with distinguished silver, sparkling brown eyes creased with years of smiling, lips still perfectly rouged. She sees Steve, and the shock and delight are immediate.

“Steve! My God, _Steve_ , it’s so lovely to see you!” She throws her arms around him, and suddenly, Steve doesn’t feel quite so terrible.

She still feels the same in his arms, in his soul. The tiny, asthmatic 120 pound Steve still matters to her, still exists to her.

“How _are_ you? You’re getting a _medal tomorrow!_ ” Peggy says, hands on his cheeks, eyes bright and so happy. Steve doesn’t regret coming at all.

“Oh, Jesus, that’s _right!_ ” Brian says, smacking himself on the forehead, “You’re meeting the _president_ tomorrow and getting a gee-dee Medal of Honor!”

“Yes, that’ll be how many presidents you’ve met, then? Seven?”

“Eight, actually.” Steve says, and can’t help but grin when she winks at him.

“Eight indeed. Well, do you want to come in? It’s Amelia’s twenty first birthday, we’re having cake and presents!”

Steve’s mouth falls slightly open. Twenty one years. _Jesus_.

“Uh… I don’t want to _intrude_ , I just came by to-”

“Nonsense! You could never intrude, you know that.” Peggy takes his hand and squeezes it.

There’s quite a few people sitting around the living room, holding fancy glasses of punch and dull blue Melmac plates. Steve doesn’t really recognise anyone, but then, how could he? It’s not like he’s an actual part of Peggy’s life anymore.

Peggy doesn’t make him go in and interrupt, bringing him to a gorgeous nearby bar laden with party snacks and a massive pineapple upside-down cake with a little striped blue candle in the centre.

“I won’t make you meet _everyone_. I know you’ve got more than enough of that lined up for tomorrow.” Peggy says, smiling and scooping him a cup of punch as he sits at a bar stool.

“I really didn’t mean to party crash. Just wanted to… you know… say hi.”

Peggy gives him a long look, one that Steve knows too well. She’s sussing out his secrets with her special brand of x-ray vision.

“I haven’t heard much from you in a long time, Steve. How are you? Really? And don’t give me that “I’m fine” nonsense, because I won’t be having it.”

Steve can’t help but snort at this.

“I’m alright, Pegs. Really. I read, I travel, I work when I want. It’s not that bad, really.”

“Is that so? So why do you look like a child’s toy in need of a wind-up? You’re hurting, Steve, and I do wish you’d let me help you.”

Steve looked down at his hands on the white marble bar.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of help you can give me. I’m kinda a… unprecedented case, you know? I don’t age, I don’t die, I just… you know… keep going.”

Peggy lets out a long breath, and puts a hand on his.

“You’re _special,_ not unprecedented. And I think you could be happy, Steve. But it isn’t an automatic process. You have to _work_ at it. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t always free.”

Steve strokes his thumb across hers, smiling dully to himself.

“I think it’s part of the serum… I don’t forget things like everyone else. Memories don’t fade, they just stay, raw and right there. My brain just holds it all and… it’s hard to try to be really happy when everything that ever made you _un_ happy is right in front of you.”

He’s never admitted this particular assumption aloud before. It’s a hypothesis he’s been building for decades now, and the more he thinks about it, the more it makes sense.

He looks up when he hears Peggy sniff hard, and she brushes a perfectly painted and shaped nail under her eye.

“How is it that every time you come visit, I end up all sniffly, Steve Rogers.” she says, and comes around the bar to hug him. As he’s sitting on a stool, he’s perfect height for her to enclose him in her arms, resting his forehead on her collarbone.

“I wish you’d told me all this years ago.” she says, her nails gentle on the back of his neck. It’s the most physical contact he’s had in…so, so long.

“We were too busy saving the world.” Steve says, smirking when he hears her laugh quietly.

She leans back and holds his face in both her hands, examining him close up. Her eyes are still a little watery, lower lip a bit trembly.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t save him, Steve. God knows, really, I am.” she says, voice rough.

“We tried. That’s… all we can do.” Steve says, and lets her hold him again.

They stay that way for a while, and if any of Peggy’s family members find it odd that their matriarch is cuddling Captain America, they don’t mention it.

Steve leaves quietly after cake, smiling on from a nearby corner as everyone sings Happy Birthday. He gives Amelia a hug, who looks a bit owlish, and she blushes bright, bright red.

Brian takes a picture on his Polaroid, beaming as he flaps it around.

“Even my _daughter_ isn’t immune!” he says, laughing when Amelia socks him in the arm.

“Good luck tomorrow, darling.” Peggy says, kissing his cheek, “and remember; you have to _work_ at it.”

“Yes, Agent Carter.” Steve says, smiling wryly when she rolls her eyes at him good naturedly.

The elevator ride down is fast and smooth, and Steve stares at himself in the mirrored walls.

_You have to work at it._

The ceremony itself is quick, but the hurry-up-and-wait mentality of getting ready, being in his dress blues, getting his shaggy hair combed back and beard trimmed and brushed by an aide, having his hand shaken a million times, that takes hours.

He stands next to Howard, he looks suitably serious as President Carter stands behind him and loops the medal around his neck, he shakes his hand and salutes as he’s supposed to. The President gives him a huge smile and says, quiet enough that only Steve hears, “It’s an absolute honor to meet you. You’re a great American and a hero to us all.”

Steve just smiles a benign, hollow smile. Sincere or not, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t qualify as a “great” anything anymore. And he isn’t even a _good_ American.

Howard on the other hand is beaming huge. He winks at Maria in the crowd, waves at Anthony, and throws an arm around Steve’s shoulder, even though Steve has to bend at the waist slightly to let this happen.

Steve doesn’t remember how it feels to be that free and happy, but God, he wants to.

There’s a reception, which Steve knows he’s obligated to stay for. He shakes everyone’s hands again, drinks champagne, which he doesn’t like, eats fancy hors d’oeuvres, which he doesn’t like, and meets diplomats and politicians, who he doesn’t like. The President leaves after about half an hour, then a mob of photographers insist on he and Howard standing for portraits for another half hour, and then finally, it’s over.

Steve lifts Anthony up onto his shoulders as they wade out of the Whitehouse, which results in more photos, but Steve doesn’t stop. The public has had its pound of flesh for the day, and he has no interest in giving them an ounce more.

Once they get outside, he walks the lawn with Maria and Howard, and occasionally he’ll pretend to start wobbling and stumbling and bend right over, causing the boy on his shoulders to start shrieking with laughter and pull Steve’s hair and ears.

“You doing okay out in Staten all by yourself?” Howard asks, giving Maria his suit jacket as a brisk spring wind blows past.

“Good as can be.” Steve says, smiling a half smile.

“You’re always welcome to come stay with us, long as you need.” Maria says, with that unerringly bright smile of hers.

“Yeah! Come stay with us! I built a rocket!” Anthony yells, gripping a sturdy handful of Steve’s long hair, now completely out of the style it had been carefully combed into.

Steve has a few moments of nostalgia, from after he and Howard had returned from Vietnam, and Steve had lived in Howard’s guest room for two months.

Anthony, in his matching top-and-bottom pajamas that were always somehow too short in the wrist and ankle, had snuck in around 7 am every morning with some sort of toy or other, and Steve would wake up hearing the quiet “ _nyyeeewwwwwmm_ , _bbvvvzzzzzzzzz”_ noises of a kid miming robot or airplane noises, laying flat on his back next to Steve, miming some sort of epic battle. He would look over at Steve, say “Morning, Uncle Steve.” and then return to his battle.

It was those moments that kept Steve going in those horrible months.

“Thanks, Maria. I’ll come visit soon, I promise.”

He lets Anthony off his shoulders when they reach the place that Howard’s towncar and Jarvis are waiting, and hugs and kisses Maria goodbye. Howard gives him a huge, tight hug, and looks him dead in the eyes.

“You call me anytime, day or night, you hear me?”

“Will do, Howard.”

Howard smacks him on the ass as he goes to get in the back, and then hesitates, and he shoots Steve a saucy grin.

“And uh… _live a little,_ you know?” he waggles his eyebrows.

Steve can’t help but snort, and he waves the car away.

He goes back to the President’s Guest House, which is of course immediately adjacent to the Whitehouse, and changes back into his regular civvies: Levi's, worn tee shirt, pullover.

He walks from Blair House to President’s park, around the Ellipse and across Constitution Avenue towards the World War Two memorial. It’s a chilly day, only a bit above freezing and breezy, but the serum keeps him toasty warm, even in the fingers and ears.

As he nears the war memorial, he hears the sound of brass instruments, playing a tune he realizes he hasn’t heard since 1945.

For some reason, his heart is in his chest as he nears the little group of people, all huddled in long coats, watching a similarly dressed band right in front of the memorial.

They’re playing the Harry James hit “It’s Been a Long, Long Time”, and Steve can’t help but wince. The singer has made an effort to look a bit vintage, pinning up her hair and wearing bright red lipstick. It does nothing for Steve beyond make him suddenly so horribly nostalgic it aches in his chest.

He can almost hear the giggles of a little girl teetering around on Bucky’s feet, and see the incorrigible swoop of his lips.

Steve’s isn’t sure what strange serendipity occurred to make this all line up this way, but he knows he can’t stand in with the crowd for long. As he walks around the band in a wide berth, he starts to look at the pillars around the fountain. He stands under the Atlantic arch and looks across the babbling water, the notes from the brass band blowing in on the crisp breeze.

After a few moments, he reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out the parchment paper envelope, just holding it in his fingertips.

He hasn’t had it on him in years- not since he left Saigon that last horrible time. It’s been packed away with his passport, untouched and fugitive.

He hasn’t been able to look at it, or even really think about it. It’s all been too raw, too exposed, too godawful.

He watches as his fingers carefully slide the tongue of the envelope open, and gently, careful with the aging paper, he draws out the sketch.

It’s still just as horribly perfect as it’s always been.

Steve sniffs hard, trying to stop his wet eyes from spilling over, but it doesn’t work well. He wipes his cheek roughly, the rest of the wetness getting caught in his beard.

He knows what he has to do.

He knows the work Peggy means; the work of letting go.

It’s work he knows he has to do, but _God,_ he doesn’t want to.

Steve approaches the nearest pillar, on the shade side out of the wind, and crouches, looking at the sketch.

It’s got dirty fingerprints, smudges, old blood, yellowing and just plain age, but it’s still just as accurate a representation of Bucky as it’s always been.

With shaking fingers, he reaches out and carefully sets the sketch down, propping it up against the limestone.

He stands up slowly, staring down at it. Staring it down... he loses.

It looks so unprotected there, _Bucky_ looks unprotected, vulnerable and alone.

Steve takes a huge deep breath, turns around, and walks away, into the trees.

His eyes are blurry, and he avoids a dogwalker and jogger as best he can. There’s a business woman on her break, an old man taking a stroll, and he’s about to duck around a tree when he hears a voice, clear and loud and impossible.

“Steve.”

He stops walking.

He stays frozen for a heartbeat and a lifetime, and then pivots.

Standing there, only a few yards away, dressed in bland clothes comically similar to him, his hair chin-length and shining, a black ball cap screwed onto his head, is Bucky.

Steve stares, every cell in his body riveted to this exact second in time.

Bucky smiles at him, crooked and endearing, and he looks so _Bucky_ that the world ends, a new planet is formed from the rubble, and then keeps spinning on just the same.

“ _Bucky.”_ Steve’s voice is a hoarse rasp, and then they’re coming together, arms wrapping around bodies and necks, hugging so feral and tight normal bones would break.

Steve takes a huge heaving breath, buries his face into Bucky’s neck, and squeezes and _squeezes_.

“Bucky. Bucky, Bucky, Bucky, _Bucky, Bucky._ ” Steve can’t stop saying it, can’t think of anything else.

“It’s me, buddy. It’s me.” Bucky says, squeezing back just as hard.

Steve leans back just enough to see his face. He puts both hands on his cheeks, just holding him.

“How? _How, how, Bucky, how?_ ” he says, shaking his head, tears pouring unhindered now.

“Didn’t you listen to nothing Pierce said? We’re basically fireproof.” He grins back, and Steve can’t help the strangled half laugh, half sob that garbles its way out of his throat.

He lunges back to hugging him, both arms around his torso, holding them together like unsplittable atoms of gold.

“God. You’re _here_ , you’re here.” Steve babbles, eyes screwed shut.

“I’m here. Been looking for you all day but yeah, I’m here.”

Steve sniffs hard and leans back to blink at Bucky.

“Looking for me? Here?”

“Yeah. I heard last week on the radio you were getting a medal today. I waited outside a bit, saw you with Maria and Howard. Figured I’d wait. But then you were gone and wandering off so I followed you.” he’s grinning again, eyes crinkling at the sides in a way so familiar Steve’s knees start to shake, “And here we are.”

Steve can’t stop pawing at him, feeling him under his hands. His body is solid and warm, alive and wonderful. His left arm is unforgiving metal under his jacket, his right, dense ropey muscle.

“I thought I lost you again. I thought you…” he can’t say it, just takes a huge deep breath, and Bucky pulls his face back down to his shoulder.

“I know. And you almost did. But I guess I got lucky.”

Bucky tells Steve to follow, and Steve is of course helpless to refuse. Bucky glances at him before they go, smirks a devastating half-smirk, and then takes off his cap and jams it down onto Steve’s head.

“Let’s go.”

Steve takes a step after him, and then his heart suddenly leaps into his chest.

“Wait!” he says, grabbing Bucky’s elbow, turning him. Steve takes off back to the Atlantic arch, and comes skidding to a halt in the loose leaves on the concrete.

He stoops, and picks up the portrait, cradles it in his hands, and carefully folds it back into its wax paper envelope as he walks back to Bucky, who is looking vaguely amused.

“You ready?” Bucky says, raising an eyebrow.

Steve follows him out of the park, away from the busy epicentre of the government and all its terrible connotations. They go through alleys, across streets at irregular junctions, through the front of a bodega and out the back of it.

Steve realizes this is because Bucky is trying to ensure they aren’t followed, and Steve hadn’t even thought of that once. God, what if he’d led some sort of terrible harm right to Bucky? He couldn’t stand it.

“Is there somebody following us?” Steve asks, jogging slightly to keep up with Bucky.

“No. But I like to keep it that way.” Bucky doesn’t turn, just keeps walking nonchalantly yet inescapably forward, hands in his pockets, strides long but unhurried.

Steve falls back just behind Bucky, trying to keep in the lee of the easy path he carves through people. Steve keeps having to step around, but people seem to get out of Bucky’s way instinctively.

The two of them are dressed in similar style, easily fitting into this strange era; Bucky’s in a faded jean jacket and has a big hoodie under it, nondescript and red. His jeans are black, well worn, plain, boring, and he’s in black Converse high tops. He looks, and Steve knows this is quite intentional, very much like everyone else on the street.

After about twenty minutes of weaving a curious trail through the city, they stop in front of a cute little tea shop with a row of big windows above the main sign, and a heavily locked resident door just to the side, with a street number and a mailbox.

“You live up there?” Steve says, looking up at the little second-floor flat.

Bucky just pulls out his keys and lets them in, entering a tidy little landing at the bottom of the narrow stairs.

Steve kicks off his shoes when Bucky quickly unlaces his, and follows him up the steps.

It’s a gorgeous studio apartment, and Steve can’t help but wonder at the domestic, easy homeyness of it. The entire streetfront wall is a strip of windows above a shallow bench that runs the whole length of the room, and it’s covered in various plants, some even hanging in baskets from the ceiling. There’s a sort of irregular grid system of open, backless bookshelves that divide the front from the back two thirds of the apartment, beyond which is a bedroom on the right, and kitchen on the left. There’s no actual doors or rooms, just a single solid wall that divides the two, and beyond the edge of the wall Steve can see the entrance to a bathroom and a closet area.

“Bucky, I… I love the place. It’s great.”

Bucky smiles a little smile as he takes off his jean jacket and hangs it on a peg, “Thanks. I’ve been here a while now. I’ve really come to like it. It’s like a little paradise in the middle of chaos, you know?” He takes off Steve’s hat and hangs it up as well.

Steve watches as Bucky moves through the space, putting his keys in a bowl, unzipping his red sweater and throwing it on his bed as he moves to the kitchen.

Steve watches as more of his body is revealed- he’s in a well loved black t-shirt with a band Steve doesn’t recognize, and it hugs to the thick muscles of his shoulders and back. His body is big- larger than it had ever been in either Brooklyn or in the European theatre. Whatever it was they did to him, it made him carry muscle like Steve.

His left arm gleams in the half light, glinting orange then white then bright silver.

“You want anything? Some coffee, tea, a beer? I think I have a beer. I tried a few the other day; I don’t think they work on me.”

Steve follows him, timid in what is clearly Bucky’s space.

“Uh... coffee. Coffee would be great.” Steve crosses his arms and realizes he’s still in his windbreaker. He shrugs it off and, after a moment of hesitation, throws it onto Bucky’s queen bed, on top of Bucky’s sweater.

When he comes back around into the kitchen, Bucky is standing, facing away, watching the kettle come to a boil, both hands in fists on the countertop.

Steve can see the tension in his shoulders, and when he watches him reach up and pull down a mug, his flesh hand shakes a little.

“Bucky.” Steve says carefully, taking a step closer, and then pauses, “Are you…” he trails off, unsure how to continue.

Bucky takes a deep fortifying breath and waves it away. “Yeah, yeah. All good.”

Steve comes up, cautious and slow, to stand beside him.

Bucky is looking down at the counter, at the mugs and the kettle gurgling away.

His mismatched hands are curled into tight fists, and as Steve watches, they curl tighter.

“I’m sorry, I don’t… I don’t know _why_ I’m-” Bucky says wretchedly and swipes at his face, and Steve realizes his voice is choked with tears.

“Jesus, Buck.” Steve pulls him in with both hands, wrapping him up, both arms around Bucky’s neck so Bucky’s face is cocooned against him. Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s middle, hands clasping at flesh and holding on. Steve buries his face down into Bucky’s hair and just breathes him in as Bucky cries quietly.

“I haven’t cried in… in _years_ , I can’t even _remember_ ,” Bucky says, voice harsh and annoyed.

“You’re allowed to cry, Bucky. For fuck sakes, you’re _allowed._ ” Steve tells him.

Bucky holds Steve just as tight, arms locked around him as if he’s scared to let go. Steve doesn’t blame him; he’s fallen away from Steve far too many times.

“Can we go sit, maybe?” Steve asks into Bucky’s hair, which smells of Prell shampoo and the cold wind.

Bucky nods into Steve’s chest, and they break apart just enough.

Bucky sniffs hard, his eyes red-rimmed, and angrily rubs at his cheek.

“I’ve been _fine._ I hadn’t cried or _nothin_ , and then you walk in and suddenly I’m just a wreck. Christ.” he says wretchedly, and leads Steve back around to his bed, which he sits on and rubs at his eyes again.

Steve sits beside him, right along his side.

“Buck, I’ve been cryin' myself out about you for the last...hell, thirty five years."

Bucky snorts in that annoyed, amused way. “Yeah. Well. I’m just playing catch-up, I guess.”

Bucky gets up and walks to the bookshelf, which is covered in random eclectic items, trinkets, and only the occasional stack of books. He goes to a cubby that seems to be mostly files, and he pulls out one of the thicker ones.

He walks back to Steve and holds it out, at arm’s length.

“I...got this for you. It’s only right that you have it. It’s too dangerous to end up in the wrong hands.”

Steve blinks and takes the file.

It says “Operation July Sundown” on it.

“Jesus, Bucky. How did you get this?” Steve stares down at the file. The last time he’d seen it, Alexander Pierce had been holding it in a blown out concrete shelter in Vietnam, more than ten years ago.

Bucky snorts darkly. Instead of answering, he goes to another of the cubbies on the bookshelf and sorts through a stack of cassette cases, before choosing one and going to his silver boombox, in the adjacent shelf, popping the tape in and pressing play. He waits for the first few notes to filter out, and he returns to the bed and sits, then lays back, and scoots himself up so his head is on a pillow.

He heaves out a great, defeated sigh.

“Which time? First or second?”

Steve looks at him over his shoulder.

He recognizes The Benny Goodman Orchestra floating over from the boombox.

“Either you want to tell me. Or none. You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to.”

Bucky looks aggravated by this answer.

“Stop being so understanding. I showed up out of nowhere, Steve; you’re allowed to have questions.”

“And you’re allowed to not have answers. I’m okay, Buck, really; I’m just so… _so_ glad that you’re here at all, I don’t even need to know how it happened.”

Bucky fixes Steve with a look, one that’s calculating and dark and almost certainly one that he never would have had before the war.

“The information in that file was compiled by the Axis, using what they knew from Erskine, Shmidt and later, Arnim Zola. Zola gave them some of what they needed to know about how to kill you, but the war was over before _Unternehmen Juli Sonnenuntergang_ could be brought to fruition.”

Steve can’t help but shudder when he hears the German words roll easily off Bucky’s tongue.

“When the Red army took Berlin, they took all the files they could find back to the KGB headquarters. They eventually decided to test the file contents on me, because I was the next best thing. They kept me in East Berlin for, I dunno, ten years? Experiments. Conditioning. Training. Washing my brain out with the electricity equivalent of bleach. You name it.” Bucky is laying on his back, fingers clasped together on his chest, staring at the ceiling as he talks.

Steve feels like he wants to puke, the occurrence of which is something he can count on one hand since he got his improved body.

“Eventually they gave up trying to keep me docile all the time, so when the couldn’t put me in a glorified freezer, they got a fucked up asshole from Vladivostok to invent a hyper focused brain zapper. Basically turned my head to mush so all I could rely on was my instincts and training. _That_ stuck a lot more, was a lot harder to come back from, let me tell you.”

Steve puts the file down on the bedspread, and scootches up so he’s laying beside Bucky, head on the other pillow. He stares at the ceiling too.

“The Russians didn’t like you being in Korea, and _then_ you went to Vietnam, so they reached out to their contacts in deep cover in the US, got a few high ranking people on board with a plan to basically...well, you saw what happened. Make it look like an accident. And you were politically inconvenient, so it wasn’t a hard sell. I went back and read some of what you said to the BBC in ‘63 and ‘69- frankly, I’m surprised I wasn’t sent to assassinate you when I did Kennedy.”

Steve blinks.

“ _You_ killed Kennedy?”

Bucky makes an annoyed noise.

“That’s hardly the point I’m making. What I _mean_ is that you made yourself a big, stupid target in a warzone where people were getting fragged for much less. You really are still as dumb as you were when you were a kid, eh?”

Steve rolls his head to look at Bucky, who is smiling fondly.

Steve is speechless with how beautiful he is.

“Yeah. Guess so.” he rasps.

“Anyway. So the KGB gave your file to the NVA to do a handover, but as soon as their brass figured out what they had, they were real reluctant to be giving it to any Americans. Can’t blame them, to be honest. Anyway, they sent me in to extract it. Killed a bunch of Americans, bunch of NVA. Didn’t matter to Pierce as long as I got the file, which I did. But he’d fucked up and miscalculated- it’d been months since I’d been in Vladivostok to get my head fried. And the longer I went, the more I started to remember, to disobey him, to get violent. I’d almost killed a couple of his guys a few weeks before. And so when I opened the file, there was this old picture of you, and it crossed a bunch of wires. I don’t remember a _lot_ of what happened, but I know I almost killed a bunch of people when they tried to bring me back in.”

“Yeah.” Steve interjects, “Yeah, I saw one of them. They had him a secret ward in the basement at that MASH, with me. And that guy, Henderson, he’d been choked, I could tell.”

“Yeah, well. They chained me to a chair for about a week, waiting for a window to ship me back to Vladivostok for reconditioning. But, well… that’s where you come in.”

“Where did you go? After, when you went into the jungle?”

Bucky heaves a huge breath, pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs his eyes.

“I...it’s all pretty foggy. A lot of stuff from then is. I don’t remember leaving you… I think, if I’d have been even a bit more lucid, I’d have taken you with me. Thank god I didn’t, or you mighta bled out.”

In the back of Steve’s brain, he thinks that dying in Bucky’s arms, away from all the hurts that had plagued them, doesn’t sound all that bad.

“I just ran, for the most part. All I wanted to do was get away from everything that was confusing me, hurting me, making me feel like I was breaking into pieces. I don’t remember much other than I ended up in Cambodia somehow. _Way_ into Cambodia. That’s when Mony found me. I was curled up in a ball and delirious in her shed. She’s about eighty, but she wasn’t afraid or anything. She gave me a blanket and a cup of the strongest hooch you ever tasted. She made me rice with basically half a rooster in it, and it was so spicy I started hiccuping, and then she put me to bed and talked to me the entire time she wove palm mats. I didn’t understand a word she said, but she didn’t seem to care. She hid me from the few people that came along, because she didn’t want anyone to know she had a runaway GI, let alone one with a metal arm. She was pretty isolated though, and let me help her with all her farm work. I figured out eventually that her husband and son had both died recently, leaving her with all this work she couldn’t do by herself. I worked pretty hard for her, tried to make her life as easy as I could. I mean, she didn’t speak a word of English, and no one ever seemed to think I should speak Khmer, but I _can_ speak Vietnamese, and she had a few words in that, so we communicated relatively well. I think she was just glad for the company, to be honest.”

Steve can’t help the tears trickling down his cheeks. He thinks of his Bucky, confused and scattered and delirious, picked up and loved by a little old lady who found a lost creature and took it in. He sniffs hard, and wipes his cheeks roughly.

Bucky looks over and smirks slightly.

“See, now you’re crying. Don’t worry, Mony is fine. I went to check on her last year.”

“No, no, it’s not… I’m just glad you found someone. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been me.”

Bucky heaves a great sigh and look back up at the ceiling. He looks like he’s considering something before he decides to reveal it.

“I mean, you were there. In a way.” He rolls away from Steve just enough to reach a book sitting on the nightstand. Apparently, he’s reading _The Jungle Book_ by Rudyard Kipling. He opens it’s front cover and reaches into the flap of the dust jacket, withdrawing a well creased, much looked at black and white photo of…Steve.

Bucky looks at it, smiling a wan smile, before holding it out for Steve to take.

“This was what was in the file. It was the only belonging I have that’s been with me since I got away. Well, I mean, and _this_ , I suppose.” He holds up his left hand, wiggling the metal fingers in demonstration, “But I always had you with me. Even when I didn’t know why you were important, I kept you. And later, when I was starting to remember, it… helped.” Bucky looks over at Steve, and Steve in the picture, and smiles a gradually growing smile, “You did help me.”

Steve looks at the photo of himself, brows furrowed.

It’s bizarre, how he barely recognizes himself. It’s not as if he’s aged really, but the man in the photo… he’s so… shiny. New. So _clean_. He radiates righteousness and surety.

The Steve that he recognizes now, who he sees in the mirror, is so much more tired. So much more grimy in all the places it doesn’t show, so conflicted and confused, bent under the weight of time and grief.

“Well, then I have a confession that’ll seem even weirder by comparison.” Steve says, handing back the photo.

Bucky laughs quietly as he tucks away the picture and puts the book back on the nightstand.

“Go ahead. Make my day.”

Steve side-eyes him as he reaches into his pocket.

“Did you watch _Dirty Harry_?”

“Might’ve done.”

Steve pulls out the wax paper envelope and hands it over in an exact mirror of Bucky’s earlier action.

Bucky just raises an eyebrow and takes it, carefully opening the flap and sliding out the drawing paper.

He unfolds the sketch, pivoting it so it’s right side up, and then goes motionless when his eyes finally take in the picture on the page. He goes so still, in fact, that Steve wonders if maybe his brain has stopped working properly and is stuck like a film on a reel.

Bucky stares at the facsimile of himself, cerulean blue eyes wide and, Steve finally registers, getting gradually wider.

“You… you…” Bucky says, and then sits up all at once. He holds the picture in both hands, staring down at it, his face shrouded in a curtain of dark hair.

Steve sits up as well, and hesitates before carefully putting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder.

“Uh… Becca. She came to see me after VE day. Gave me that. I’ve had it ever since. I kept it with me, always.”

Bucky shakes his head slightly, and then looks up at Steve.

It’s a strange look, one that Steve can’t even begin to decipher. He looks… disappointed, almost, but also shocked and confused.

Steve isn’t sure what to say, or how to react.

Bucky looks back down at the picture in his hands, and then, after a moment, he starts to laugh.

Now Steve _really_ doesn’t know what to do.

Bucky puts the picture on his lap and puts both hands on his face, fingers sliding into his hair and pulling it back from his face. He flops backwards heavily onto the bed again, and keeps laughing at the ceiling.

“Jesus. Best laid plans of mice and men, eh? Try and try and try, and _still_ you can’t take a goddamn hint even when it’s shoved in your face. Jesus, but are you something else, Rogers.”

Steve frowns down at him.

“What?”

Bucky groans, shaking his head and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“I tried. I really did. But leave it to you to carry a torch for half a goddamn century.”

Steve just stares down at him. He feels like his hearing has been sucked away.

Bucky lets his arms fall to his sides, and he fixes Steve with a tired look.

He sits back up and gently lifts the sketch from his lap, then pivots and sits cross legged, right in front of Steve.

He looks at his face from close up, eyes darting all over it.

“God, how I tried to protect you, Stevie. It took every ounce of energy I had not to be selfish, and even then, it wasn’t enough. God, I wanted you so bad, and I knew it was terrible. I knew what would happen to us. To you. What would have happened before the war, and how it could never have happened after.”

Steve’s hold world inverts on him. His mouth falls open, and he thinks his brain has a connection suddenly explode into sparks inside his skull.

“What? _What?_ You… how...Bucky _I_ wanted _you_ -”

“I knew how you felt, Steve. I don’t think others could see it, but I knew you inside and out. It’s one of the first things I remembered. Wanting you, and knowing that I could never let myself have you. I remembered the drawings you would do of me when you thought I wasn’t looking. You looked at me like I looked at you, except I didn’t have any evidence of it to leave behind like you did with your pictures.”

Steve’s heart is _hammering_ , so loud and hard he’s amazed the lights in the room aren’t shaking.

“Bucky. _Bucky,_ why didn’t you _say_ something to me? _God_ , what I would have _done_ , if I’d-”

“Exactly.” Bucky says sharply. “Before the war, if I’d have said something, you’d have jumped right in. And then you’d have been beaten and killed like all those other men. And during? Jesus. You really think they’d have let Captain _goddamn_ America be a queer? You’re a lot of things, Steve, but you’ve never been delusional. You’d have been hung out to dry, crucified and ruined. And there was no way I was letting that happen, not while I was still drawing breath.”

Steve just stares at him, breathing big and ragged breaths. He’s angry suddenly; he’s _furious_.

Bucky looks back down at the picture in his lap, tracing his fingers along the edges of it.

“And I saw how you looked at Carter. And I knew that if I said nothing, did nothing, you’d go off with her. Marry her, have kids, all that. Leave old uncle Bucky back in France where he belonged.”

Steve scoffs, disbelieving.

“You… you don’t get to _decide_ things like that for me! I… there was _no way_ I would have just walked out of that war without you, Buck. Because when I _did_ , it goddamn broke me! How could you just _plan_ me, like I didn’t even factor into the equation?”

Bucky gives him a tired look and flops back onto the bed.

“Because you’d probably throw yourself off a bridge to save even the worlds biggest shithole of a human being, so _Lord knows_ that you’d have thrown it all away for me. You’re the worlds most predictable martyr, Stevie, I’m sorry. You never knew what was good for you, and you sure didn’t like being told either. The world needed Captain America. And he sure as shit didn’t need me.”

Steve’s rage is an angry simmer, bubbling inside like magma.

He leans over and glares down at Bucky, who just looks resigned.

“So, what? You aim me at Peggy, hope for the best, and toodle on home, confident in a match well made? Fuck you, that’s _bullshit_ and you know it.”

Bucky gets a strange look on his face then, and he sits up, this time facing away, legs off the edge of the bed.

“I knew I wasn’t coming home.” he says, voice terribly quiet.

Steve frowns deeper.

“What? What do you mean, you _knew_?”

“It’s hard to explain. I just… you know that feeling? When you can picture yourself in the future, doing something? I… I lost that. After Zola had me in the lab, after you rescued me I just… I couldn’t see myself back home. Couldn’t picture it. I knew it in my _bones_ , Steve, that I wasn’t making it back. And, I mean. I was right.” Bucky laughs dryly, humorlessly, “I never came home, did I?” his voice is tired and quiet.

Steve can’t help himself. He surges forward and wraps his arms around Bucky’s torso from behind him, pulling him into his chest, presses his face into his hair. He lays them down on their sides, clinging to him still, feeling Bucky’s hands come up and gently lay over top of his.

Steve fits himself along Bucky’s back, knees into knees, chest to scapula, and just holds him tight.

It feels so _good_ to hold him. To feel the heat of him, the shift of his breathing, to smell him, hear the air coming in and out of his lungs.

Bucky doesn’t seem concerned or uncomfortable. In fact, he holds Steve’s wrists gently, with both metal and flesh hands, and doesn’t let go.

Steve’s eyes are closed, his nose pressed to the back of Bucky’s neck.

“I still wish you’d’ve told me, Buck. Even if you had all these big plans. I still wish you had.”

Bucky heaves a giant sigh, and Steve loves that he can feel his ribcage expand and contract under his arm. He loves that he can feel how alive he is, and right _there_. He feels like he could melt their flesh together with the warmth they make side by side.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Bucky mutters.

Steve hums in response. It’s an old idiom of his mother’s, and it makes Steve’s whole chest ache with fondness and grief for a life long lost to the inexorable plod of time.

They listen to the Benny Goodman Orchestra, and the hush and shush of traffic outside.

Eventually, Steve says “Will you tell me about _after_ Cambodia? And how you got the file the second time?”

Bucky shifts a little against Steve, wiggling a little but not trying to leave or make space between them. He seems content to be cuddled, and Steve is incandescently pleased by this.

“Okay. Well. Things were… starting to come back. It was tough, because the older the memory, the harder it was to add significance to. I would get flashes and chunks of things, totally randomly, but it was like… I dunno, looking at a bunch of photos of people you don’t know? Meaningless faces. Yours came first, but even then, it took a while to remember that Big You and Little You were the same guy. There was a few months there where I thought you were different people. But then everything started to leak in. I think my brain was healing from all the shocking and freezing they did to it. I mean, I can heal everything else, so why not that?

“Anyway, I left Mony after about a year. I got her set up so it would be easier for her to run things alone, but she also had a great-niece coming to stay with her soon and she didn’t want to have to explain the weird American with the metal arm. So I left. Snuck back into Vietnam. Followed the Ho Che Minh trail south a ways and tried to get wind of Pierce but there were so many GIs around and he was buried pretty deep, so I changed tactics. Went north to Hanoi, snuck onto a train headed back to Russia.”

“You went back to _Russia_?” Steve says, careful not to exclaim too loud right next to Bucky’s ear.

“Yup. I had business to attend to and I needed information. And I got it. By any means necessary. It wasn’t nice and it probably wasn’t ethical, but then, neither was what they did to me.”

Bucky’s gone stiff against Steve, as if awaiting his expected angry reprisals.

But that was Old Steve. Current Steve has been at war too many times to believe in ethics as anything other than an enormous swath of grey.

“You did what you had to. And you’re right; it isn’t like they didn’t have it coming.”

Bucky softens slightly against him, relaxing.

“I didn’t…. It’s not like I _tortured_ anybody. I was much more merciful than they deserved, and I sure didn’t enjoy it, which is more than can be said for a lot of _them_.” his voice is almost a snarl, and Steve gives him a reassuring squeeze, letting him know he’s safe in Steve’s arms, “But I got what I needed. Pierce’s name, and all the names of his deep contacts, in Vietnam, the Pentagon, everywhere. And, I found your file. Pierce has it sent back to Vladivostok for safe keeping. I think he was worried people might start putting two and two together and didn’t want the MPs potentially finding it. And then, once I cleaned house in Russia, I hopped back on a supply train headed for Hanoi. It was... riding across China on the top of a train… watching the world go by… it was gorgeous, and it gave me time to get my head organized. The more I got back, the more I realized I was missing, but I kinda made a game of it. Start at something I could definitely place, and then work backwards. Tried connecting the dots. You’ll be happy to know; most of the dots were you.” Bucky tilts his head just so so Steve can see he’s smirking at him.

Steve smiles and laughs quietly in his throat.

“Yeah, well. Even with all my memories intact, all _my_ dots were you. So what does that make me?”

“Pretty goddamn pathetic, I reckon.”

Steve snorts and buries his face back into Bucky’s hair.

“And then what?” Steve says into his neck.

“And then… well, I cleaned house in Vietnam too. Took me a while. Had to kinda dodge in and out of pretending to be a grunt, and then sneaking off into the jungle to avoid the NVA. I cut my hair to fit in with the GIs, not that you’d have noticed when you saw me in Saigon. By then, I was just hunting down Pierce. I think he started to realize I was coming for him, because all the little lights in his network were blinking out. It was tedious as hell, hunting them all down. And he got wise and started to cover his tracks and make false trails. I should have known he was hiding in the embassy. I’d been considering getting on a ship and getting back to the States, because he’d lain some false data about him being in Washington a few months before. But then the NVA was closing in on Saigon, and I heard his voice over the radio telling a South Vietnamese diplomat to bug out. So I just had to find him in the city. And, well. Yet again, that’s where _you_ come in.”

Steve squeezes his eyes closed. He’s blocked out most of the memory of the rooftop, and the sedatives Howard had stabbed him with when the group of 10 agents had dragged him screaming and crying out of the burning embassy has done a good job making everything foggy and slippery in his memories.

“You fell Buck. _Again_. Into a burning building. _Fifteen stories._ ”

“I got lucky. That’s the only answer I have. I got burned badly, trust me, but not so hot as I couldn’t heal. Broke a bunch of ribs, couple vertebrae I think. Burned my hair pretty good too, so I cut most of it off again. I was able to kinda disappear into the confusion before anyone knew what was happening. I locked myself in a basement and sweated it out for two days, waiting for all the burns and my bones to heal. Ate some really questionable canned fish and drank mango nectar I found in a can. I don’t really have an answer for you about why I wasn’t killed by the fall. Probably like the last time- dumb luck. Or dumb _bad_ luck, where I just can’t seem to die when I’m supposed to.”

Steve lets out a long, strangled breath. There’s tears choking him again, and he’s only barely keeping himself together. Bucky must hear his shaky exhale, because he turns in Steve’s arms so they’re face to face

He lifts his free hand- the flesh one, as the metal one is pinned beneath his body- and puts it gently on Steve’s cheek, his thumb stroking across the coarse hair at the edge of his beard. He looks at Steve, tired sweetness in every feature.

“Somewhere, somehow, there was a future for us, Stevie. Where everything went right. Where we died as old men buried side by side, or in a hail of bullets and glory. But we just…. Hell, we just can’t seem to die right, can we?” he smiles a sardonic half smile, his signature.

Steve closes his eyes tight shut, and can feel tears clinging to the lashes.

“I can’t lie, Buck.” Steve says, swallowing hard, “I was getting pretty sick of living this ridiculous endless life, without you.”

Bucky just scootches forward and puts their foreheads together, and Steve can feel his breath puffing against his cheeks and lips.

“Doesn’t sound like something Captain America would say.” 

Steve lets out another shuddering breath.

“I don’t think I’m him anymore. I think he died when you did. Every time you did.”

“God, Steve.” Bucky shuffles a bit, and then Steve’s face is pressed into his chest as Bucky pulls him close. Steve tightens his arms around Bucky’s waist, pressing in tight.

They stay like that for a long time, as the minutes melt and blur into meaningless increments of nothingness. Steve listens to Bucky’s heart and Bucky’s lungs, and he both thanks and curses his dreams for becoming a reality.

After a good long while, Steve says “Tell me more about when we get old and are buried together.”

Bucky laughs, and Steve feels it against his nose and chin.

“Uh, ok. Let’s see. Well, you and Carter have a whole mess of kids, and I-”

“No, not like _that_. How is was supposed to be. How you _wanted_ it to be.”

Bucky hesitates, and Steve leans back just enough to see his face, which looks uncertain.

“You said you wanted it.”

Bucky looks tentative, and Steve realizes he’s afraid.

Afraid of revealing too much. Of showing his hand. Steve doesn’t blame him; he’s usually in the same camp.

“I’ll tell you how I wanted it to be, if that helps. You can add on if you want.”

Bucky just watches him as Steve pulls himself up and puts his head on a pillow, so they’re talking to face to face.

Steve bites his lower lip quickly, likewise nervous at revealing so much of what he kept hidden for so long.

“Uh. Ok. Well.... do you remember Mrs. Caravaggio? Down the hall from our old apartment?”

Bucky’s face contorts slightly, as if he’s trying to flex some mental muscle to make his memories resurface.

Steve continues, hoping he can help.

“She had a phonograph that she would wheel out into the hall on Saturday afternoons. You’d prop the door open and we would listen to her music.”

Bucky blinks.

“I… I think so? I… were there kids?” he looks confused at his own recollection.

Steve beams. “Yes! The little girls from down the hall would come, and you’d balance them on your feet and dance them around our place. They loved it so much, Buck.”

Bucky starts to smile again. “Yeah. Yeah, I kinda do remember.”

“Once, after the girls mom called them back, a slow song came on. Glenn Miller, “Moonlight Serenade”. And you asked me to dance with you. Oh _man_ how I wanted to. God, you were so handsome, I wanted to say yes so _bad_ , but I was afraid of what you’d see once I got close up. That you’d see everything I was tryna hide. But, I mean. Apparently, you saw it all anyway.”

Bucky just looks back at him.

“So… that’s what I imagine. In a perfect world, where everything went right. I would have said yes. And we woulda danced the night away. And we would dance every night, until we were old and our knees were all creaky and even then we’d still dance.” Steve feels bashful suddenly, looking down at the bulky swell of Bucky’s chest under his t-shirt to avoid eye contact.

When he glances back up, Bucky looks crestfallen, and Steve immediately reaches for him, both hands on Bucky’s.

“I can’t remember. I can’t... remember, but… can we make that the story? Even if it didn’t happen, I… I want to remember that as real. If I can’t remember what really happened, I want to remember that.”

Steve nods, and he lifts a hand and puts it gently, carefully on Bucky’s cheek.

“Sure, Buck. That can be the story. I like it better anyway.”

Bucky is suddenly up off the bed, and he goes over to the boom box. He ejects the tape, and starts to shuffle through his pile of cassettes. Their plastic cases make such a particular clatter as he puts them into haphazard piles, and finally, he seems happy with the tape he’s found.

“This one?” he says, holding it up to Steve.

Steve smiles as he gets off the bed and approaches. He takes the cassette and grins. Apparently it’s _Greatest Vintage Slow Dance Hits_ , and Moonlight Serenade is the first track.

“Yup. That’s it. First one.” he hands it back, and Bucky pops it into the player.

They wait until the foggy sweet opening bars start, and Steve watches Bucky’s profile. He’s just staring into space, brows slightly furrowed.

“He used to… play this music. Pierce. He had a record player and he’d put it on. I… it’s what I remember when I think of this song.” he frowns, “I don’t want that to be in my memory.”

Steve can’t think of what to say, so he holds out his hand.

Bucky slowly looks down at his hand, and then back up at him.

“You’re sure?” his voice is quiet.

Steve nods. “Very sure. Never been _more_ sure.”

Bucky takes his hand, the metal cool and smooth in Steve’s palm. He’s seen what this hand could do, but now he feels nothing but safe as he pulls Bucky close.

It isn’t _really_ dancing, when it comes down to it. They’re really just hugging and swaying, Steve’s hands clasped behind Bucky’s back, cheek against his hair, Bucky’s arms over his, his hands pressing flat against Steve’s shoulder blades, holding them together.

The next song is 'Where or When' by Benny Goodman, so they keep right on dancing. Occasionally, their eyes meet and they’ll both split into big bashful smiles. Steve thinks he might otherwise have been embarrassed, but he isn’t in the slightest. It feels so entirely _right_ to be holding him, as if he’s placed a missing organ back into his body and is finally allowed to heal.

Holding Bucky like his, swaying to music he knows deep, deep in his bones… if he closes his eyes, they could almost be back in their moldy, musty old apartment.

Bucky is smiling up at him when he looks again, and Steve smiles back. Their faces are so close, and Steve can feel the current that runs between them. It’s so strong, he wonders if maybe that’s what’s been keeping them alive and tethered all these years; an electricity that spanned thousands of miles and endless years.

“Will you stay with me?” Bucky asks, very quiet.

Steve is speechless so he nods a little, and gently shoves their foreheads together. He feels Bucky exhale sharply through his nose in a small facsimile of a laugh.

Bucky pulls away from his arms and goes into the kitchen, putting away the coffee accoutrements they never ended up using. He glances at Steve.

“You hungry?” he asks, seeming to have realized he’s missed an important part of being a host.

Steve sort of sags where he stands and shakes his head.

“No. No, I… I’m _exhausted_. I don’t know why, but this all….it took it right out of me, Buck.” 

Bucky looks relieved.

“Ok. Come on.” he waves a hand at Steve in beckoning as he leads them back to his bed, which is all creased and indented now from them laying on it. He throws back the covers, and seemingly without a thought, pulls his shirt off over his head.

Bucky is distracted pulling his snug Levi’s off his legs, but Steve can’t help but stare at the many scars ripping across his left shoulder, across his ribs and shoulder blade. Bucky seems to sense the eyes on him, because he goes still and glances back at Steve.

“Sorry. I forgot. I can keep it on, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

Steve shakes his head hard and sharp, and comes up right behind the other man, gently placing a hand on the thickest of scarring, right near the join of metal and skin.

“Never, Buck. You could never make me uncomfortable.”

Bucky smiles a vague smile, and then grabs the hem of Steve’s shirt and pulls it up over his head. Steve, surprised, complies and ducks his head into the collar, lifting his arms so Bucky can pull it all the way off.

“Now we’re even.” he drops the shirt and gives Steve chest a once over. He starts off smiling a raunchy smile, a joke on his lips, eyebrows cocked, but then his face falls. He lifts his metal hand to the network of silvery pink scars on Steve’s right shoulder, the fingers cold but dull on the insensitive skin. He starts frowning, finger tips running along the strip that goes up his neck, then back down to the splash across his right pec.

It’s been ten years, but the scars are still there, and show no sign of fading.

“The napalm did this?” he asks quietly, finally making eye contact.

Steve nods. “Didn’t heal like normal. Or… I guess it _did_ heal like normal. That was the problem.”

Bucky looks back at his hand, which he brings up to Steve’s jaw. He touches the place on the edge of his jawbone where the very tip of the burn is, carefully made invisible by strategic growth of his beard.

“Come on.” Steve says, smiling at him and taking his hand in his, “I’m tired. And we can’t undo every bit of the past all at once, can we?”

Bucky shakes his head no, and steps back. He climbs into his big double bed, shuffling over in clear invitation for Steve to come lay next to him.

Steve sits and quickly shimmies out of his jeans, leaving him like Bucky, in simple briefs. He gets under the duvet, which is big and airy, and immediately, he feels Bucky’s arms reach for him.

Steve comes closer, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s warm, big body. His skin is soft, his muscles relaxed and pliant under his hands. He buries his head into Bucky’s chest, as close to his heart as he can.

Bucky just lets him burrow, metal hand stroking gently at his hair.

“You can sleep, Stevie.” he says, and so Steve does.

When he wakes up, he’s immediately disoriented.

He’s warm and surrounded by softness, and he feels like he really _slept_ as opposed to slipping into a vague loathsome unconsciousness like he usually does.

He sits up, head whipping around.

He’s alone, it’s dark outside… and it’s snowing. Big, fluffy flakes that fall lazily in meandering trails.

“B...Bucky?” he says into the empty room, and he can feel panic rising in his chest and into his throat. What if he’s gone again? Disappeared into the ether, a figment of Steve’s muddled mind.

He’s terrified of this possibility, of every possibility, that took Bucky away.

What if he really is just _alone_?

But then he hears footsteps, and Bucky comes around the corner from the kitchen, a glass of water in his hand, still just in his nondescript black briefs.

“Sorry, I was thirsty.” he says, and when he sees Steve’s wide eyes and heaving chest, he immediately looks worried, putting the glass down and climbing onto the bed, reaching for him, “Steve, are you okay?”

Steve lets out a huge breath, so enormously relieved that he shakes as he wraps Bucky up indiscriminately in his arms and pulls him back down into the covers.

“Sorry. Sorry. I just… you were gone and I was afraid.” his mouth is jammed into Bucky’s sternum, but he doesn’t move back at all.

Bucky just hugs him back, like he had when Steve had fallen asleep, and Steve can feel him press his face into his hair.

“Not gone. I’ll do my best to never be gone again, Steve, I promise. You’re not alone.”

It’s those words that do it.

Steve feels the crest of the wave coming. He can hear it. He can feel the weight of the decades, the multitudinous cataclysms of simultaneous relief and despair.

He starts to cry. It starts as just tears, but almost immediately, he’s sobbing, huge, full body gasping sobs into Bucky’s chest.

He cries for the years they lost, and for the years he lived as a ghost. He cries for the life Bucky could and should have had, bright and young and beautiful. He cries for the deaths he saw, the deaths he didn’t.

He cries for the complete and utter euphoria of the finding of lost things.

Bucky doesn’t let go. He just holds him tight, rocking slightly. Steve can feel his lips pressed to the crown of his head, and it’s that that anchors him through his breaking and reforming, until he’s finally just sniffing and trying to wipe his eyes on Bucky’s meagre chest hair.

“I think that was a long time coming.” Bucky says quietly, running his hands through Steve’s hair.

Steve laughs wetly and sniffs hard. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

Bucky just smiles down at him, rubbing his metal thumb across Steve’s chin. The metal against the coarse hair makes a peculiar sound.

Steve reaches over to the side table and gets a tissue, sitting up to blow his nose and throwing it somewhere before resettling back into Bucky’s arms.

Bucky leans forward, shuffling them a bit so their foreheads are pressed together. Steve lifts his hand and puts it gently on the side of Bucky’s neck, stroking his thumb along that perfect jawline. His _favorite_ jawline.

“Why didn’t you come find me? Right after?” Steve whispers into their shared air.

Bucky is quiet for almost ten full seconds, before he bites his lip a bit and responds.

“There were bits of the network I had to unravel, you know. Things that had to be _undone_. I knew I couldn’t stop and reward myself with just running to you. I wanted to _earn_ you. It… took me a while. Still not sure if I deserve this, really.”

Steve frowns and shakes his head immediately.

“Bucky. _Bucky_. You deserve _everything_. None of this was your fault, _not a goddamn thing._ ”

Bucky just meets is eyes, direct and unwavering.

“It wasn’t yours, either.”

Steve wants to argue. Wants to tell him about all the times he let Bucky fall. All the ways he could have saved him.

“I can see all those denials piling up in your head.” Bucky says, lips twisting in a dry smirk.

“I had choices, Buck. You didn’t. They took that from you.”

Bucky just sighs and closes his eyes again.

“Can’t change what’s done. Just what happens next, I guess.”

Steve lets his gaze wander around Bucky’s face, so close at hand. The long dark eyelashes, the lips that still swoop in that beguiling catlike manner which was always so hard to translate onto paper. That noble chin of his, so sturdy and distinguished, like the chin of a tsar. 

“Can I kiss you?” Steve asks. He isn’t completely sure where the words came from, but they’re out now. He’s too hot suddenly, his entire skin glowing and tight.

Bucky’s eyes snap open, pupils adjusting in the low light.

He just blinks, inhales a quick breath, and then suddenly Steve is being kissed.

Steve inhales through his nose, a bit taken aback, but so immediately fiercely happy.

Bucky angles his face, the warmth of his mouth coaxing Steve’s open, sweet and tender. Steve's lips are dry, but Bucky's aren't, and they slide and catch in a delicious way. Steve clutches at him, hands slipping into his thick long hair, holding them together. Bucky’s tongue is in his mouth, and _oh_. This was what it felt like to be kissing the love of your life; like being ripped open by the most pleasurable of hands, reaching into his chest and replacing his heart with a part of Bucky’s soul, throbbing deep in his chest from that moment on.

Lifetimes, he’s waited for this. And for the first time in history, it feels just as it should.

Steve lets himself be pushed onto his back, Bucky following him. He’s got his metal thumb under Steve’s jaw, tilting it up as he kisses Steve hungrily and thoroughly.

He delves deeper into Steve's mouth with his tongue, and he pulls back when Steve groans involuntarily, gasping and wide eyed.

They stare at each other, panting, and Steve can’t stop looking at Bucky’s mouth.

“We… never did that before.” Bucky says, and the tip of his nose bumps Steve’s.

Steve shakes his head and pulls Bucky back down, kissing him hard and pouring in every ounce of the incandescent desire he’s carried for almost fifty years. It glows between them, bright and hot, and makes their hands wander. Steve feels like he’s made out of lava from the heat that’s flashing through him, burning up from the inside, or like he has a raging fever.

In only their briefs, their chests are pressed together, skin on skin. Steve grabs handfuls of Bucky’s shoulders, rakes his hands down to his waist and grips at his hard obliques as they twist and flex. Bucky twines their legs together, palms Steve’s left pec and scratches with his nails, just a little.

Steve realizes that he loves the weight of Bucky on top of him, holding him down, keeping him cemented firmly in reality. He loves the friction of their skin catching and sliding in turns, loves the slippery sweep of Bucky’s tongue in his mouth. He feels _alive_.

He feels more real in that moment than he has since he stepped into the Vita Ray machine.

Bucky runs a hand through his hair, tugging his head back, and he moves his mouth down to Steve’s neck, licking, sucking, biting below the edge of his beard. Steve’s eyes roll back in his head and he can’t help the keening noise he makes as Bucky’s tongue darts behind his ear.

Other than a scant few dimly lit, ill advised hook ups in the back of a New York bar, Steve hasn’t been touched like this in almost twenty years. He’s lighting up under Bucky’s hands, nerves that have been dead for decades coming back with streaks of fire racing under his skin.

He gets brave and lets his hands slide down to Bucky’s ass, which is perfectly shaped, round and powerful and fills his big hands in the most splendid way. Bucky inhales sharply against Steve’s neck and his hips lurch forward, and Steve can feel he’s getting hard against him.

“Ah _, ah_ , Steve.” he says, his breath hot and damp against Steve’s neck.

“Are you okay? I don’t want to make you do anything, I-”

Bucky gets up on his elbows above Steve, looking straight down at him with his dark brows furrowed, a crease right down the centre. He lifts a hand and reaches around behind his head, pulling all his dark hair over to one side of his neck.

Then he puts the hand on Steve’s cheek, stroking across his lower lip with his thumb.

“You ain’t making me do _anything_. You got any idea how badly I’ve been wantin’ you since we was just idiot kids?”

Steve can’t help but laugh.

“I think I do, actually. Bout as badly as me, I reckon.”

Bucky grins at him, face shadowed and teeth glittering in the low light. He’s looking at Steve’s mouth, tilting his head as he considers it from his close up vantage.

“I’m gonna keep kissing you. And I’m gonna touch you. I wanna touch you.” his eyes flick up to Steve’s, the question in them unmistakable.

Steve inhales, nods sharply and pulls Bucky’s mouth back onto his, resettling his weight on top of him. “Yes, Bucky, yes, you can.” he gasps against his mouth.

Bucky wastes no time. He tries to move off of being directly on top of Steve, but Steve only lets him go so far, and anyway one of Bucky’s legs is between his thighs and curled around his leg, so they’re effectively locked together. There’s just enough space for Bucky to run his flesh hand down Steve’s abdomen, his short nails catching on every groove and dip in his heavy muscles. Every touch makes Steve’s flesh burn with bone deep and incinerating pleasure.

He goes right under the waistband of Steve’s briefs, and Steve almost bites Bucky’s lip off when his hot hand closes around him, tight and _God_ , so good.

Steve makes an embarrassingly high-pitched keen into Bucky’s mouth, who in response chuckles darkly and sets about stroking Steve to full hardness.

The skin of his hand is warm and soft and well tended, like someone who hasn’t been holding weapons recently. The delicate skin of Steve’s cock slides over the throbbing hard flesh underneath, dry but not bad, good Lord, not bad at all.

“Jesus, Steve.” Bucky says, prying their lips apart, and then he’s kicking off the blankets, exposing them to the warm air. “I wanna see, get these off,” he yanks at Steve’s briefs, almost tearing them right in half as he does so, and Steve is too distracted to really pay it any mind.

Bucky looks his fill, and his chest is rising and falling rapidly, his eyes hungry and darkly lidded.

“God. Look at that. Jesus, did you have this giant thing the whole time? Guess I never saw you hard like this before, but God damn, Stevie, this thing is ridiculous.” he goes back to stroking, and Steve kisses his smarmy mouth, blushing even brighter.

He’s never thought of himself as well endowed before, but then he’s never really stopped to think about it. The one woman and the few men he’s been with did always seem to get a bit wide eyed when they saw him naked, but he’d always put that down to the rest of his ridiculous body.

Bucky could be onto something.

Steve groans into the kiss, swiping in with his tongue. His mouth tastes sweet to Steve, and entirely unlike he ever imagined it to.

Steve knows he isn’t going to last long, the build up too intense, the yearning too much. He’s clutching at Bucky hard enough to hurt, but Bucky keeps stroking, collecting the wetness seeping from the tip of his cock and using it to ease each slide of his hand. Steve knows he should be trying to reciprocate but it’s all so _much_ that he can barely think straight, can barely remember to breathe.

He breaks away from Bucky’s mouth, eyes screwed shut, and shoves his face into the crook of his neck, gasping.

He can feel it cresting, feel all that enormous warmth that’s been crushing him concentrate and build inside him. It feels so horribly, terribly good that tears seep from the corner of his eyes, and he gasps Bucky’s name in a broken mantra, over and over.

He comes everywhere between them, streaking the bed, their bodies, Bucky’s hand. Steve’s whole body shudders its way through, hips lurching helplessly, and Bucky’s strokes gentle to ease him along. Steve groans an involuntary, animal groan as every bit of pleasure is drawn out of him, gentle and merciless and perfection incarnate.

Steve claws his way back to the surface and kisses Bucky’s gaping mouth, clutches them back together as tight as they can go. He can feel Bucky hard against him, and his own tireless supersoldier erection is more than ready for round two, trapped between them

“Ah, _Steve, Steve, Jesus,_ ” Bucky says as Steve tugs his briefs off and takes him into his hand, feeling the living heat of him, the honest desire of his flesh. Bucky has one hand fisted in Steve’s hair, the other grabbing a handful of his ass, and honestly Steve can’t tell which is which, his skin is so overstimulated and burning.

Steve wants to put his mouth on him. Wants to lick him everywhere, wants to fuck him, wants to be fucked. It’s an unruly and terrifying amount, how much he wants Bucky. Half a century hasn’t dulled the pull he feels, hasn’t rounded off all the sharp edges of his desire. He wants everything, all at once, all right now.

“Just this. Just this, Steve, is okay.” Bucky, always a mind reader, sits himself up on top of Steve, laying their cocks alongside each other and rolling his hips. Steve’s hands find their own way to his waist, before snaking up around his ribcage and pulling him down, letting himself be hidden inside the dark curtain of hair that falls around their faces as their lips meet.

Bucky makes a truly delicious noise into his mouth, his tongue slippery and eager against Steve’s. He rolls his hips, sliding them together, and he groans again and pulls Steve’s hair, seemingly by accident, not that Steve cares.

Steve moves his hands to Bucky’s face, sliding his fingers up into his hair, pulling it away from his face. The ends tickle Steve’s eyelids as they brush past, and Steve smiles into Bucky’s hot, demanding mouth.

Bucky pulls back a bit, and says between two sharp inhales, “What’re you laughin’ at, huh?”

Steve just shakes his head, looking up at Bucky’s face, put into stark relief with his hair tugged back.

“Nothin’. You’re just so damn beautiful is all.”

Bucky rolls his eyes and latches his mouth onto Steve’s neck, setting to work with his teeth. He nibbles as he thrusts his hips, and then bites harder when Steve gets cheeky and slides a hand between their bodies to hold them together.

It’s a hot and heavy drag of pleasure now, never really waned from when he came the first time, just a continuation of a colossal high. He feels like his skin might split right open with it all, overflow and melt him down.

Bucky’s hips move faster and Steve’s big hand holds them tight, and he can’t help but gasp when he feels Bucky erupt in his hand and onto his belly, sticky and slippery and warm.

Bucky’s face is buried in Steve’s neck just like Steve’s had been in his, but he’s got his mouth open and is sucking at Steve’s neck like he’s water in a desert.

“Bucky, _Bucky_ , please, kiss me, kiss me, please?” Steve begs, and Bucky obliges, pressing his swollen lips to Steve’s and bringing a hand down to finish Steve off for a second time.

Steve goes off again within a minute of having Bucky’s hand back on him, making an even bigger mess of them. As his body shakes and judders, he pulls Bucky down onto him with all four limbs, rocking them together as one entity who share breath and life and blood and sweat.

They kiss slowly, reverently, as they come down from their spectacular cloud. Their bodies are languid with heat and sated desire, and Steve runs his hands all over Bucky still, feeling every individual cell under his hands. _God_ but he feels so alive, and Steve’s heart seems to finally have accepted that he in fact is. It makes him feel like he must be glowing.

“I love you, Buck. Always have.” Steve says, just to say it. His eyes are gently closed, and he bumps their foreheads together. "Every day before, and then every day since, I loved you. _Every day, Buck_."

Bucky laughs quietly and runs a hand through Steve’s sweaty hair, pressing a tiny soft kiss just between his eyebrows.

“Love you every day too, Stevie.” 

They stay that way for a long time, probably too long, just languishing in their shared bodies, before Bucky levers himself up and pulls Steve along with him.

They have a fast and hot shower, standing in the steam, arms wrapped around each other. They rip off the sheets and put on fresh ones, haphazard and truly atrociously messy considering they’ve both been in basic training and commanded troops, and then climb in, heedless of their nudity or wet skin.

They settle in enfolded into one another, nested in the other’s soul, and are asleep within a handful of moments.

The dream is strange.

It’s an idyllic scene, surreal and lovely.

He’s walking along beside a mountain stream, which is trickling and babbling over big, round stones. The grass on the banks is bright green, and there’s scrubby pine trees growing against the canyon walls, which reach up on either side of the creek for hundreds of jagged feet.

Steve watches as a butterfly lazily floats over the surface of the stream, flapping in a gentle breeze, alighting on a little yellow flower.

He isn’t sure why, but he feels like he knows exactly where this strange place is, even though he’s sure he’s never stood here on these banks before.

He keeps walking, picking his way through this untouched valley, which glows with summer vitality and life. He can see snow on the peaks of the mountains around him, but it’s lovely and warm down in the canyon, cushioned with grass and moss. He considers a few of the peaks around him, and he realizes he might be somewhere in the Alps.

And then it happens.

He inhales sharply, looks down, and there it is.

It’s a body.

Or rather...it was a body.

The bones are half disappearing into the grass and earth, swallowed by time and the reclamation of nature. They are bleached with sun, the ribs curved delicately towards each other. The skull is non-descript, like every other fleshless human skull, ominous and unremarkable.

There’s strands of fabric still clinging to the ribcage, the rough blue fabric faded to a grey wisp, twisting a little in the breeze. As Steve stares, the butterfly lands on a rib and opens and closes its wings in a vague fashion.

He never saw where Bucky fell. Never saw the impact that he always assumed had shattered him into a million pieces, broken him, had taken him away from Steve forever.

But now he can’t stop looking at this strange scene, so still and preserved.

“Steve.”

He jumps, whipping around in panic.

Bucky is standing there.

Not Bucky the soldier. Not Bucky the skeleton, not Bucky the tortured agent of shadow.

Just Bucky, as he’d been when Steve had seen him in the park in DC.

Bucky glances down at the bones of his past behind Steve, considers it for a moment, and then looks back into Steve’s eyes.

“It’s time to go.” he says, voice clear and unwavering. He holds out his hand to Steve, and smiles a smile so warm it glows.

Steve looks back behind him.

Maybe they really are just bones.

He looks back to Bucky, and takes his hand.

“Let’s go.”

Steve blinks awake, the afterimages fading from his mind as he comes back to lucidity.

It’s early, the sunrise only just painting the sky orange outside the big windows. The city is awakening, but underneath the blankets, in the little studio apartment, Bucky is still asleep.

Steve looks at Bucky’s face, so much younger in sleep, as it always was. Each exhale rustles a few strands of his hair, and Steve gently brushes them away, smiling.

Bucky’s breathing changes slightly, and the arms around Steve flex as he wakes up.

Steve watches as his eyes start to open, and grins even wider when his eyebrows furrow as he realizes Steve is awake.

“ w’ time’z’t?” he says, coming closer and pressing his face into Steve’s neck.

Steve just wraps Bucky in his arms, cocooning them in the warmth of their bodies.

“Dunno. Doesn’t matter.”

Bucky just hums in sleepy, amused agreement and weaves their legs together.

Steve closes his eyes and listens to the sound of Bucky breathing, feels it against him, feels the beat of his heart right next to his.

“Love you, Buck.” Steve says quietly, burrowing his face into the crown of Bucky’s head.

Bucky hums again, and Steve feels lips on his neck, and the warm breath of a deep, peaceful sigh.

They fall back asleep like that, tied together, as the sun rises on them for the first time in decades.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've decided that if Steve was around, being a supportive friend for Howard, he'd be able to curb some of his more megalomaniacal aspects of his nature, and his influence would help him to be a better father and husband.  
> I also kinda invented a backstory for the Winter Soldier which is probably a bit different than most, but then, I've played fast and loose with all the Marvel characters so meh lol.  
> By this time, once he's out of the military, I imagine he looks like Infinity War Steve, hair and beard wise, including when he goes back to Saigon to try find Bucky.  
> Also; the fall of Saigon was not like this exactly. Similar, but not quite the same. The American Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Che Minh City) wasn't quite as large, but it was still huge, and the Americans abandoned a LOT of people in the city when they bugged out.

**Author's Note:**

> come visit me on Tumblr @ DisraeliGearsGoesTumblin, and also see the amazing original artwork by @orientalld


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